ASUS G73Jh: Today's Top Gaming Laptop
ASUS has made it a goal to increase their retail presence in the mobile market. With their successful Eee PC and UL series, they cover the netbook and entry-level markets. At the high-end, things get a bit more fractured. Do you want a multimedia laptop with Blu-ray support and reasonable battery life, or are you more interested in a high performance gaming notebook? The G-series has generally catered towards the latter, and with the G73Jh ASUS now has one of the fastest notebooks around.
Performance is all well and good, but there are a few big [cough] problems with gaming notebooks. The obvious ones are size, weight, and battery life. The more performance oriented the parts in a laptop become, the less likely you are to get a lightweight chassis or good battery life. The G73Jh does nothing for users interested in addressing the size concerns—we'd suggest looking at the Alienware M11x as a viable small gaming laptop. The other issue with gaming laptops frequently comes down to the almighty bottom line. We've seen some good attempts at keeping prices reasonable, including the ASUS G51Vx. The G73Jh does cost a bit more than other gaming laptops, but take a look at the spec sheet and suddenly $1500-$1600 doesn't seem so bad.
You get an i7-720QM CPU, HD 5870 GPU, 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory, a full terabyte of storage (via two 500GB 7200RPM HDDs), and a 1080p LCD. Speaking of which, did we mention that finally we have a laptop with great specifications where the LCD doesn't suck? Sure, it's still a glossy LCD (not like you're going to be using it outside much), but the 1000:1 contrast ratio is a feast for the eyes. If you've been on the lookout for an affordable gaming laptop that doesn't cut corners, the G73Jh is now in the pole position.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3662/asus-g73jha2-affordable-xlsized-gaming
