In the face of powerful desktop parts powering other laptops, can Asus’s mobile gamer compete?
The clash of the desktop replacements. That’s how we’ve started this month’s reviews and it’s a proper battle royale. Except without the screaming kids, the fountains of blood and ‘Beat’ Kitano. First we had MSI’s new take on the hybrid laptop – all gaming dock, upgradeable GPU and floaty-light notebook fun – and now we have Asus’s beefy trad gaming laptop, the G751JY.
And it’s a hulking great beast of a machine. We’re not just referring to it being a hefty 17.3-inch notebook weighing nearly five kilos – it’s also packed full of the best mobile hardware money can buy. Which is lucky, considering how much it costs.
The processor is top-end mobile Haswell fare, a fully-Hyperthreaded Core i7 capable of running up to 3.5GHz in this chassis, with a huge – if mostly unnecessary – 32GB of DDR3 memory, an M.2 512GB SSD (the Samsung XP941, reviewed in PCF300) with a 1TB HDD and an Nvidia GTX 980M. The keyboard and trackpad are worthy of note too. There are extra macro keys and buttons to launch Steam’s Big Picture and Nvidia’s game streaming software, while the trackpad is wide and responsive, with a pair of discrete buttons. It’s so much better than the all-in-one trackpad abortions we’ve got Steve Jobs to blame for.
For the gaming performance, it’s the range-topping Nvidia GPU that will get all the plaudits, but the screen Asus has used deserves a mention too. It’s stunning. The 17.3-inch IPS panel has a native resolution of 1920 x 1080, but impressively the screen also runs at 75Hz. That’s just 15Hz over the traditional 60Hz, but it makes a visible difference. Even before catching the numbers in the Nvidia control panel and game settings screens, we’d been impressed with the clarity and smoothness – this is a quality modern notebook screen. And it’s no surprise it’s the panel we’ve seen doing the rounds running the leaked mobile G-Sync driver to such good effect…
You may be less impressed by the 1080p resolution of that panel, but it’s still an excellent option for a gaming notebook with a tight pixel pitch on a small screen. Put simply, it runs beautifully at that res. There’s also the fact that higher resolution panels just aren’t available in IPS trim at this size in decent or affordable volume.
That GTX 980M though does help make the screen look good, hurling around textured, tessellated polygons at fantastic frame rates. The Maxwell GPU isn’t quite on a par with the desktop GTX 980 sat inside MSI’s Gaming Dock, running to about 75 to 80 per cent of that full-fat graphics silicon. But that still makes it more than a match for any 1080p games you wish to throw at it, and thanks to the chilled-out Maxwell architecture, it runs seriously quiet too.
You’ve also got the Asus chassis design to thank for that too. The thin ‘n’ light movement is all well and good for the notebook you take into meetings or sit with on the sofa, distracting you from the human horrors of your girlfriend binge hate-watching Geordie Shore. But for a gaming laptop, packing components which really benefit from proper thermal attention, you need some girth in your chassis so you don’t end up with the whining fans spinning up in a rushing cacophony.
That’s one of the things which spoils the MSI GS30 2M Shadow. Even when it’s docked, the cooling on the CPU is always noticeable. Add in the low-level, but still persistent, noise of the Gaming Dock’s GPU and PSU fans and you get an experience which is far from ideal. The G751JY on the other hand is whisper quiet even at full tilt. And that makes it a great desktop replacement to use as a docked machine too. Plug in a keyboard and mouse, output to a decent monitor and you’d be hard-pushed to tell you weren’t gaming on a full-fat tower PC.
And while we’re comparing it with the MSI, this chunky, powerful gaming laptop will last longer away from the plug socket too. The eight-cell battery, combined with the low-power Maxwell chip, managed an extra eight minutes of gaming time against the svelte GS30 with its four-cell battery. It may not sound a lot, but that puts it at over an hour of high-quality gaming – and the gap increases when you’re just watching video to over 40 minutes extra.
Asus’s G751JY may not have the upgradeability or gaming power of the MSI’s Gaming Dock, but right now this chunky machine is a much better option, both on the go and plugged into a desktop monitor. Plus it costs a good deal less. – Dave James
Specifications
Screen size 17.3-inch
Screen type IPS
Native resolution 1920 x 1080 @ 75Hz
CPU Intel Core i7-4860HQ @ 3.5GHz
Memory 32GB DDR3L
Graphics Nvidia GTX 980M
Storage 512GB Samsung XP941 SSD, 1TB HGST HDD