We don't know what has happened lately but many portable gaming machines from many of the big players seem to have more emphasis placed on the lighting effects, rather than the hardware inside.
We are quite sure than a substantial portion of the enthusiast audience want something sleek in design, but perhaps a little more subtle.
Enter the Asus G73 Republic Of Gamers laptop, a machine which makes a clear call to sports car design while having a specifications list to bring most grown men to their knees with desire.
The Asus G73 ROG packs a Core i7 processor, AMD HD5870 mobility, 1080P LED screen, 1TB of storage and 8GB of DDR3 ram into its formidable chassis.
The procesor is the Core i7-720QM, clocked at 1.6ghz – a quad core Hyper Threaded CPU which incorporates Turbo Mode (Rev 2) to achieve 2.8ghz when required. Equally so when temperatures get too much, it can downclock to 996mhz to lower heat output and power consumption. The Core i7-720QM is not quite as powerful as the high end 820QM because it has only 6MB of Level 3 cache, not 8MB. It still should be powerful enough to deliver a fantastic experience however.
We have looked at the HD5870 mobility before and it is an impressive mobile solution, even though it runs 150mhz slower than the desktop solution (700mhz) and sports only 800 stream processors, compared to 1600. This is all part of the need to lower power consumption however … after all they could hardly slot in a 190W desktop card.
Processor | Intel Core i7 720QM @ 1.6 ghz (2.8ghz Turbo) |
Display | 17.3 inch 1080p (1920×1080) LED Backlit |
Memory | 8GB DDR3 1066mhz |
Graphics | ATI Mobility Radeon HD5870 1GB GDDR5, DX11 |
Storage | 1TB (2x500GB) 7,200 Hard drives |
Optical | Blu Ray Combo Drive |
Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium x64 |
Lan | 10/100/1000 Ethernet |
Wireless | Intel 802.11 b/g/n ” 2.4 ghz, Bluetooth V2.1 |
Webcam | 2.0 Megapixel |
Ports | 4 USB, Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, microphone, headset, 8-in-1 Flash Memory Card Reader |