the Republic of Gamers G550 JK from ASUS
aside from being the notebook that holds the world record for the highest altitude terrestrial land party yeah
that's right 10 of these bad boys ascended to the top of Mount Elbert as
part of a collaboration between Tech Syndicate Austin Evans and new EG and us
where we all play Doom at 14,400 FT but
aside from that it's actually a fairly downto Earth gaming laptop with a
premium mainstream price Girl Next Door good looks and solid build quality
with its power loss protection affordability and performance the sp920
from a data makes upgrading to an SSD remarkably safe and simple Hardware wise
the G550 JK is appropriately equipped for the price the core i7 4710hq quad
core is suitable for gaming and light content creation the single 8 gig stick
of RAM is enough for gaming but would love to have a dual Channel partner for
a total of 160 gigs for heavier work the GTX 850m GPU will be enough for light to
medium gaming duties and the 750 gig 7200 RPM hard drive strikes a good
balance between storage space and cost and then of course there's the usual
Wireless AC Bluetooth webcam Etc now the
Keen eyed among you might have already started noticing some similarities
between this and the n550 JK also from
isus and if you did then Bravo Watson
because they are indeed very closely related but for those of you not
familiar with the n550 we'll do a physical overview the back of the screen
has a beautiful brushed aluminum finish that's actually surprisingly easy to
clean so definitely brownie points there not quite sure how they did it other
than that all you'll find back there is a reflective assus logo and an
illuminated Republic of Gamers one on the bottom we find two cooling intakes
for the dual fan cooling system that is nearly silent at idle reasonably quiet
under load and does a great job of keeping the laptop cool our GPU stayed
around 80 running unage in heaven even with the overclock option enabled in GPU
tweak and more importantly the GPU was running consistently at around 1.17 GHz
also on the bottom we find a very large speaker girl with four drivers behind it
that must be contributing to the surprisingly loud and solid content
consumption experience especially given the notebook slim 1.1 in form factor
because let's face it when it comes to speakers there's only so much you can do
within a confined space and I was impressed but then I guess knows that
too because they also included this Sonic Master external subwoofer thing
it's not the kind of thing I imagine I'd use very often but it actually does
dramatically improve the performance of the already above average built-in
speakers onto the sides we get an SD card reader a USB 3 port a DVD Rider in
a Kensington lock then on the left side we've got a headphone SL microphone Jack
two more usb3 ports DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs a hardwire Ethernet
port and finally the 8in jack for the external sub and then finally power in
and it might seem like a trivial detail but the red beveled edge here above the
ports actually looks even more striking in person than it does on video it looks
really really nice but just like for people a notebook's looks can only get
it so far and once we open this baby up we find the stuff that really matters
and it looks like we're going to start on a high note my biggest complaint
about the last G Series notebook that we checked out was the TN screen that
suffered from some Wicked color shift
ASUS has done away with that on the G550 JK and on with a matte finish 15.6 in
1080P IPS screen instead it may not have
the most amazing contrast ratio in the world and an IPS display won't give you
the same Lightning Fast pixel response times that a TN will but the viewing
angles are solid colors pop like they just aren't able to on a TN and I even
found it quite usable Outdoors as long as I kept the screen out of super bright
direct sunlight on top of a mountain and the good news keeps coming the red LED
backlit chicklet keyboard has three brightness levels and is set into a PR
solid aluminum wrist rest that is aluminum so is going to stain eventually
but thankfully uses a more matte style anodized finish that is much easier to
clean and more resistant to wear than some of the other finishes that I've
seen on Notebook wrist rests over the past few years aside from the keyboard
we've got a power button a perplexing dedicated button to access the web
storage that ASUS includes with the notebook and a click pad the clickiness
of the pad is actually a bit too stiff for my tastes but it's kind of academic
since I prefer touch to click or pressing the proper clicky buttons at
the bottom anyway the big thing I look
for in a touchpad is its ability to reject my fingers and my Palms when I'm
trying to use it two-handed or when I'm trying to type and in this regard it
performs admirably it also supports the usual gestures through ASUS's utility
one of the many mostly useful things that ASUS pre installs on the notebook
including a facial unlock utility a USB charging utility and their power for
Gear power management utility the only really questionable pre-installed items
I removed right away were a trial of McAfee live safe and some wild tangent
game thing battery life was about what I expected The Notebook lasted for 57
minutes running Heaven starting with a full charge but of course with a more
typical workload NVIDIA's Optimus technology hands-off display duties to
the onboard Graphics which allowed it to last for just shy of 3 hours when
browsing the internet listening to music watching YouTube video something that I'd consider to be a fairly heavy and
yet not gaming work load So Gone are the
days of tolerating half an hour battery life from our you know high powered
desktop replacement in gaming notebooks which I guess leads us into our
conclusion about the G550 JK this isn't
really a little brother to the beastly g750 JZ so much as it's um more like a
sexier trim level of the
n550 the 750 is kind of like the six
Series in the family and this is more like the three series if we were to make
make a car analogy it's still tuned it's still fun to drive but its overclock GTX
850m is not in the same league as an
overclocked 8 ADM which raises an interesting question what is the
competition for this notebook the ge60 appache from MSI features gddr5 memory
for improved graphics performance and an RGB backlit keyboard that comes at the
cost of extra thickness and su's own
n550 JK has a touchcreen but a slower CPU and 5400 RPM L be at higher capacity
hard drive so that's where the G550 JK comes in it's got its own set of
compromises um I mean I'd have liked to see an SSD instead of a hard drive or at
least an M sat or m.2 upgrade slot but
it's beautiful and solidly built it delivers very respectable specs for the
price and that's not a bad place to be speaking of not bad places to be this
one was at the top of a mountain setting a world record and we are giving it away
to one of you you now as you may have already noticed during the b-roll for
this video it is covered with a whole bunch of cool signatures from people who
were also at the top of the mountain including Logan and Kane from Tech Syndicate Paul and Kyle from new EG
Austin from Austin Evans and of course
me and Luke from the show you're watching right now so guys check out the
link in the video description for details on how you can win this bad boy
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