Asus G74 gaming notebook

If into gaming, I’m pretty sure you guys are familiar with Asus’s line of gaming notebooks called ROG – Republic of Gamers. It consists of 15.6 and 17.3 inch gaming laptops with an aggressive design and powerful hardware, enough to run the latest title while offering a pretty decent price tag.

The Asus G74 is the latest addition to this family, a new 17.3 inch monster meant to replace the popular G73 series and fix some of the problems users complaint about on it.

This laptop is yet to be available on the market, but early review units already started popping out, just enough to see if this new laptop is worthy of out attention or not. And based on them, it really seems so.

The guys at gamingrig.com got their hands on one of these units and gave it a proper spin, as you will be able to read in their thorough Asus G74SX 3D review . The 3D appendix means the laptop came with a 3D screen.

As you can see via that link, the new unit does not bring a lot of changes in terms of specs over the previous generation, the Asus G73SW. There’s a quad-core Intel 2nd generation Core i7-2630QM processor, 16 GB of memory, dual storage drives and an Nvidia GTX 560M, the latest being the novelty here.

Overall, the G74 is a little bit faster than its predecessor, the faster graphic chip allowing slight 5-10% performance improvements, especially in games and some other graphic intense apps.

Biggest changes don’t affect the hardware though. Asus tried to solve the problems users had with the G73s, thus they redesigned:

• the cooling system so the laptop no longer overheats
• the keyboard, making keys slightly bigger, better spaced and emphasizing the arrow keys we usually use a lot in games
• the trackpad and made it bigger and more ergonomic
• the screen’s hinge, making it more massive and reliable
• the bottom part, allowing now easier access to hard-drives and memory modules

The screen also seems improved, and according to the testers, it’s the best display they ever encountered on a laptop so far.

All the changes will probably come with a price increase as well, but for the moment we know anything on this. We should wait thus for the official price release from Asus which should happen soon, as they announced the G74 will hit the stores by July.

Update: The G74Sx is now available on the market in various stores. The best prices seem to be offered online by Amazon, with price tags going between 1500 and 2000 bucks based on features and equipment levels.

There is also a cheaper versions sold by BestBuy, going for around $1300, but you should be ware that that one comes with less memory, smaller hard-drive, and most importantly, a poorer graphic chip (it’s still an Nvidia GTX 560M, but it’s a 128 bit version, not )

All in all though, the G74SX looks impressive. The guys at Asus really listened to the pleas of their ROG device owners and managed to fix pretty much all their complaints. That’s why expect the G74 to be quite popular, and for a good reason: you’ll hardly find a better gaming laptop in its price range.

Tags: ASUS, Asus G74, Asus G74 gaming notebook, gaming notebook