About asus laptops… Careful… I own a G73JH, a gaming laptop…
Asus have made some really stupid mistakes with several of their laptop models… In the case of mine, it’s that the graphics card is basically some old or modified model where for some reason the fan speed is set to 40% or something, it’s also incapable of utilizing new drivers properly without several updates requiring flashing (the asus bios update utility is useless now it seems, and anyway, many of the needed update have to be done by hand).
It runs fine with the original drivers supplied with the laptop (which are WAY outdated, make for ugly and slow graphics by comparison to say, the Von Modded version… That modded driver basically allows me to play crysis on max details, FSAA etc all on 1920x1080, the native resolution of this laptop, fluently… Compared to the original driver which requires a reduction in resolution and no FSAA etc… Crysis without FSAA even on 1920 looks very pixellated in the tree-heavy areas…)…
Asus tech support is aware of all those issues (and many more) but does rarely react, if ever. The asus and general laptop forums are full of complaints.
Asus also rarely provides it’s own graphic driver updates (well, those drivers suck anyway).
Problem is, just updating the drivers worked fine for me for a while… And then, for no apparent reason, I start getting the grey screen of death a lot at random… Changing drivers does not help (unless I use the old original one)… So now I have to sift through thousands of threads about the GSOD issue, lots of people stating that I have to return the laptop and get a new one or a new graphics card etc (thank god I used to be a computer geek, or I’d actually have believed that)… Found the solution that worked for me after days of searching… Still, what I did did not work for many others etc… What a mess! It’s like how some game companies/publishers release games that won’t let you get past the first mission or something without crashing when they first come out…
Gotta say, lots of very obvious things going on here that Asus should have noticed really… Or at least reacted to the huge amount of complaints…
Another issue is the native screen resolution of 1920x1080. Going lower than the native solution makes many games etc look ugly, but this is a huge resolution and while it’s fine with older applications, very hardware hungry programs (games, 3d graphics design programs and whatnot) can really bring this high-end laptop to it’s knees even with an ati 5870 and 8 gigs of ram… As I said before, modded drivers help a lot (god, both ati and nvidia are really incredibly inept compared to the modding community… Seriously, they should just hire those guys and let them do the updates)… And they’re often more stable than the original’s…
So if you know how to tune your machine via drivers and overclocking (I did not yet need the latter fortunately, I’m not too keen on it esp. since graphics cards now seem to be somewhat sensitive to overheating and damage due to expanding and then contracting again) then you’ll be fine for now performance-wise, but I have a feeling that with the way game code/engines are written in such a messy and inefficient way nowadays or are bad console ports… That laptops like this will have a hard time handling the next gen games, at least the ones which are somewhat hardware hungry… Even though theoretically the hardware is entirely sufficient… If only they’d have left the native resolution at 12xx or at most 14xx… 19xx is completely unnecessary and resource intensive…
The laptop also comes with a metric fuck-ton of bloatware (no real issue, but it’s still annoying as hell), including programs such as asus live update which don’t seem to work well if at all.
All that being said, it’s a nice machine overall of course… Best laptop I’ve owned, but man, my problems are nothing severe compared to what many people have been going through, and as I said the solutions can be hard to find… And asus seem to be misdiagnosing them quite a bit (in the case of laptops sent back by users) if I’m not missing my guess… A lot of times they simply replace the graphics card when that isn’t even necessary or the solution to the problem… And then return the thing…
I’m personally not too impressed with the reliability of a lot of the current gen laptop models.
And of course battery life is usually inversely proportional to the power of the machine.
So if you want a high end laptop for gaming etc, just go with a regular PC… Alienware make some great ones (local hardware sellers have custom solutions by alienware which at times seem to be better than what you can get on their website… And cheaper… Some real monster machines at the same price as a high end gaming laptop or cheaper, but much more reliable and powerful… Or build your own machine…).
A regular laptop for work and standard multimedia stuff makes sense of course… But for gaming I wouldn’t bother… Plus they’re hard to clean and they definitely do get dirty.
If you do get one… Get one of those cooling rigs or whatever they are called, they can help quite a bit to prolong your laptop’s component’s lifespans if you constantly tax it heavily…
Edit: Also, there is more than one sound-driver installed (no idea if it has more than one sound chip or not, don’t remember), and those interact very badly and can cause all sorts of trouble and crashes…
De-install all the creative labs stuff… That’ll also make more audio config options become available to you, amusingly enough.