Asus G75VW Laptop Review
Design and build quality
After a super-light laptop to whisk off on your travels? Keep on moving, chum, this isn't the machine you're looking for. The G75VW with compact Asus Keyboard is an unquestionable beast. It's 415mm wide, 320mm deep and is 52mm thick at its fattest point. It's certainly not going to slide easily into your backpack.
Don't try lugging this monster around -- it'll be much better off sitting nice and still on a desk.
That's not much of a problem though as at 4.5kg you're not likely to ever want to carry it out of the house. Instead its home is on your desk, among bottles of Mountain Dew and empty Doritos packets, or perhaps periodically undertaking a shift to your lap when you want to shoot your virtual friends in the face from the comfort of your sofa.
Its design isn't too far removed from the angular, aggressive stylings of the Asus Lamborghini VX7. This recent iteration's been slightly toned down, but you can certainly spot the family resemblance. The ridges on the lid are present, as are the angry-looking "exhaust" vents on the back -- thankfully there are no pretend brake lights here.
In most other ways it's every bit as daft though.
The Lamborghini logo has gone, but the stealth-bomber aesthetic will still get the pulse of every teenage gamer racing faster than a can of Red Bull and an espresso. The matte black coating, steel grey keyboard tray like the HP DV Series DV5-1000 (Silver) Keyboard and lack of any glowing LEDs make it look just suave enough that it might appeal to those of you old enough to hold a UK driver's licence.
Construction seems generally quite good -- great news, considering how much you're expected to shell out for it. There's little flex in the lid and practically none in the keyboard tray or wrist rest. The rear 'bumper' seems much more firm than it did on previous iterations too. Rather than being right at the back, the screen's hinge has been brought forward, which makes the opening action feel very sturdy and helps it sit firmly on your desk when you're typing -- or, more likely, attacking civilians -- for hours on end.
The Asus G75VW is a well-constructed, sturdy old brute and has comapct Asus G Series Keyboard .
On the sides you'll find four USB 3.0 ports, an SD card slot, separate headphone and microphone jacks, a mini display port, HDMI out and an Ethernet port. There's also a Blu-ray drive to enjoy your high-definition discs on the Full HD screen. Storage is taken care of by a pair of 1TB hard drives, giving a generous 2TB of overall storage -- plenty of room for games, movies and TV shows.
The G75VW stuffs in a whopping 17.3-inch display, which should be plenty big enough for all the gaming and movie fun you could want. It has a full 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution, which is of course what I'd expect on a machine of this size and price. Small text is sharp and the flurries of snow in the visually stunning snowboarding documentary The Art of Flight look delightfully crisp.
It's bright too, and deliciously bold, making gory headshots appear more stomach-churning than ever. Your films and TV shows will look great on this display, and even if you do find yourself wanting to fix your eyes on a massive telly screen you can always hook up to one via the HDMI port.