After a season of wafer-thin ultrabooks and pocket-sized ultraportables, there's nothing quite like a giant desktop-replacement gaming rig. Despite making a name for itself with the original Eee PC Netbook and the new Zenbook, Asus has always had a solid line of gaming laptops (sometimes marketed under the "Republic of Gamers" subbrand), the latest of which is the G74SX-A2.
Asus G74SX-A2 - Core i7-2630QM 2GHz - 17.3-inch TFT
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
While that jumble of letters and numbers may not be very illuminating, the system it refers to is a strong performer that has the added benefit of not looking like the typical ugly gaming laptop. The $1,949 G74SX is an angular black box, and its muted matte finish helps it from feeling as massive as it actually is.
These days, two grand is really an astronomical amount to pay for a laptop, and generally only Apple gets away with charging that much. In this case, you do get some serious hardware for the money, including a quad-core 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M GPU, a 160GB solid-state drive (SSD) coupled with a 750GB hard-disk drive (HDD), and a whopping 16GB of RAM.
All that makes it good for mid- to high-level gaming, though not on the same level as our current gaming laptop leaders, the Origin EON17, which is an overclocked $3,500 monster built into a hideously generic Clevo chassis, and the $5,000 configuration of Dell's Alienware M18x that we tested earlier this year. But even serious gamers are unlikely to notice a difference except on the highest details settings of the latest PC games such as Skyrim and Battlefield 3.
If you're only a casual (or semiserious) gamer, this system may be overkill, but the possibilities of the large dual hard-drive setup and 16GB of RAM may be appealing to video editors and other multimedia types. If you want gamer-oriented power, without the over-the-top designs and blinking lights of an Alienware PC, the G74SX could be your wolf in sheep's clothing.