the CM Storm sf7 uses a massive 18 cm
fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to
learn more now with all the recent hype about thin and light gaming notebooks it
might be easy for you the viewer to assume that more traditional gaming
notebooks aren't relevant anymore but it's time for a bit of a reality check
heat is a beach and the fundamental laws of the Dynamics haven't changed lately
so if you want more processing power you're also going to need to cram more
cooling capacity into it otherwise thermal throttling or Worse the eventual
degradation of your components can occur
not likely to be a concern here this is
ASUS's latest and greatest from their Rog series The g750 Jay-Z an
aggressively styled gaming notebook that aims to deliver power without compromise
in a mobile form factor let's start with a physical tour the top has the same
classic black soft touch finish that we've seen in the last few generations
of G Series models a plastic Chrome ASUS logo and a white illuminated Republic of
Gamers logo beneath it I liked this the first time I saw it and I still like it
now rather than putting colorful LEDs all over it that say OMG look at me I'm
high performance ASUS takes a more subtle approach and lets aggressive
lines and raw benchmarks do the talking instead speaking of aggressive let's
move around to the back where we find two independently controlled cooling
fans each with it its own copper heat sink and heat pipe system connecting it
to either the CPU or the GPU in theory
it provides great Cooling in practice it provides great Cooling and surprising
Acoustics as well it's pretty much silent which means a lot coming from me
under light workloads and stays reasonable even when you're gaming I
mean I'm gaming right now here's my microphone look at that very very nice
moving around to the left side we find a Kensington lock two USB 3 ports a DVD
writer and Blu-ray reader combo drive and a full-size SD card reader while the
front features indicator LEDs for The Usual Suspects that can be viewed with
the lid open or with the lid closed then on the right we find headphone and
microphone jacks two more usb3 ports for a total of four HDMI hardwired gigabit L
VGA power in and I yes the one I glossed
over that is not mini DisplayPort although it'll work with a DisplayPort
monitor just fine and even daisy chain NOP that is a Thunderbolt Port this is
one of the few PC notebooks with Thunderbolt making it a fantastic option
for non-gaming folks like creative professionals as well imagine as a
photographer packing something like this to a a wedding all the CPU power IO and
Cuda acceleration you need with nice fast photo and video offloading as well
nice on the bottom we find a removable battery and a dedicated subwoofer to go
with the effective albeit cryptically placed front speakers that seem to fire
out of the rear vents as much as the base of the the screen here and then
finally there's an easy to access door that you can open up to change your RAM
hard drive or either of the two m.2 ssds
that are included I think it's great that it uses a self- retaining screw by
the way that's basically impossible to lose so yay but there's not much else of
note down here and now it is time to
open this baby up on the inside we find
more classy styling the bezel surrounding the g750 JZ 17.3 in screen
is a reasonable size and has no adornments other than a stylized webcam
peephole another plastic Chrome ASUS logo and some protective rubber stoppers
and while the 1920x 1080 resolution TN
panel may be a point of contention among folks expecting an IPS panel with a
resolution greater than 1080p ASUS isn't the first manufacturer to sacrifice
viewing angles and resolution for the sake of not having to deal with Windows'
terrible DPI scaling better pixel response times and the ability to
actually run your games at Native res on a mobile GPU so I guess I see where
they're coming from even though it's not a tradeoff I would personally make if
given the choice speaking of trade-offs if only I could have the beautiful looks
of brushed aluminum on my wrist rest without feeling like I have to clean it
every 26 seconds but there is good news
too the chicklet style keyboard embedded in this brushed aluminum finish here is
a very solid implementation with longer than usual travel distances for the keys
a vibrant white backlight so you can see what you're doing in the dark and a
pretty darn standard layout that other than lengthening the right control
doesn't try to do anything crazy just the way I like it the nice big touchpad
is also thoughtfully made with a great texture on its plastic surface a stylish
Chrome beveled edge and a very satisfying hear that mechanical click to
the dedicated non click pad buttons
again something that I prefer so with the physical tour out of the way let's
talk about the specs of the g750 J I mean all that babbling about processing
power and cooling during my intro I better be ready to back it up with some beefy numbers right yeah don't worry we
got beefy numbers first up is Intel's core i7 4700hq a quad core 8 thread
monster that runs at 2.4 GHz Bas and up to 3.4 GHz with turbo boost it's matched
with 24 gigs of DDR 3600 RAM so whether
you're using this machine for gaming hardcore Chrome tab abuse or even video
editing you will have CPU power and RAM to spare and next up is the other big
star of the show an overclocked NVIDIA GTX
880m this graphics card has a fully enabled GK 104 GPU in it that actually
runs at darn near the same specs as NVIDIA's desktop Enthusiast grade GTX
770 one key difference though is that our mobile graphics card trades some
memory speed for a larger 4 gig frame
buffer this will be a boon when running higher quality textures but it will
reduce performance somewhat in other situations but of course when I talk
about performance reductions I mean compared to graphics cards that are
about as thick as this entire notebook and go in a desktop PC so yeah there you
go the rest of the unit ain't too shabby either and as I was going through making
a little list for myself so I didn't miss anything you know you got your dual 128 gig ssds that can be configured in
raid for boot although strangely they came unrated out of the box for me um a
1 terab mechanical storage Drive onboard killer and wireless I started thinking
to myself how does this compare compare to buying a desktop in the old days a
gaming notebook was Heavy loud sucked battery like there was no tomorrow and
finally didn't even perform very well well now that's changed a fair bit and
aside from the 4770k being a fair bit faster than the 4700hq that's in this
notebook the rest of this stuff is actually pretty close to the hardware
you'd use in a typical custom desktop I mean not exactly mind you I'd make some
different choices for sure but I still thought this would be an interesting
exercise so here's what I came up with I decided to put together a desktop
configuration that in spite of some approximations so for example I went
with an 18-in LCD and the cheapest reasonable quality UPS I could find as
an equivalent for the notebook's 17.3 in screen and built-in battery and then I
took all that stuff and like threw in a $50 charge like what NCI charges for PC
assembly and with the overall goal not of achieving perfect equivalency in
every detail but rather of building a desktop that was of similar spec
features and quality compared to my notebook I wanted to see what the
difference in price came out to be and what the difference in performance came
out to be surprisingly for performance par with similar grade components it was
only about a $200 difference or about 10% and here are a couple of little
performance benchmarks so when you look at how closely it performs I mean yeah
it's not as good let's be realistic here
a gaming laptop is not going to be as
good as a desktop from a price performance ratio but compared to the
way it used to be if you're willing to sacrifice that upgradeability for
portability it's not nearly as bad as it used to be which I guess leads us
naturally into our conclusion who is this product for does the g750 JZ fill a
useful niche as an in between option
amongst the sexy slim gaming notebook and big non-portable gaming desktop
options out there I'd say yes yes it does at 4.8 Kil
it's not light enough that I'd want to go backpacking up a mountain with it but
it sure beats the heck out of trying to Lug desktops around if you're like us
and frequently filming on location and if you combine that with the fact that
it's much less expensive quieter and runs cooler than high-powered slim
gaming notebooks out there and is much more portable than that value gaming
desktop whose performance it came surprisingly close to I think we've got
ourselves a serious Contender for your money if you want a portable workstation
/ gaming rig that you don't need to carry around with you all the time
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