ASUS G74 Review + BenchMarks ~ Saad Reviews (Reviews + Benchmarks)

ASUS in known for its performance gaming laptops, Graphics card, Motherboards which are the dream of the mostly people as they are expensive but perform beyond the limits.I liked the subtle ferocity of this design language. It’s not brash, but upon a closer look the hard edges of and unapologetically simple finish communicate the laptop’s purpose. With that said, ASUS has added a couple pieces of flash. The fan vents at the rear of this beast are now surrounded by chrome and the display hinge is covered by gray trim. While these are small details, they give the chassis extra pop without going overboard.new chassis doesn’t offer is a more functional display hinge. Like previous G-series gaming laptops, the display on this model is hinged approximately two inches from the rear. This gives the laptop a bit of a bubble-butt and also prevents the display from tilting back significantly. Although it’s unlikely that users will often need the display to tilt more than it currently does, I did find it annoying on occasion, such as when I wanted to check on a benchmark without sitting down in my office chair. The display does not tilt back enough to give me an ideal viewing angle while I am standing above it.This is a beefy laptop, weighing in at almost ten pounds. Despite that, I found that the chassis displayed little noticeable flex in most scenarios. The only exception was every large laptop’s traditional weak spot – the optical drive. Gripping the laptop’s front left-hand side (with the lid open) can create enough stress to spontaneously eject the optical drive tray. Such an occurrence is not unheard of with laptops of this size and weight, but it’s obviously not ideal.The viewing angle stability proves to be acceptable. Although it comes to variations on the display beyond certain angles from the bottom left and right, the images remain stable in the horizontal plane even at relatively extreme angles. Result: An external monitor can be forgone with the G74SX without qualms.A Core i7 2630QM is the order of the day, paired with 16GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 560M. Not quite the 580 then, but still an impressive beast. Dual Storage, a 750GB hard drive+160GB SSD are inside, and the 1920x1080 screen looks great — even if it does only use TN technology. The backlit keyboard is rather swanky, making night-time play enjoyable.Sound is handled by Realtek hardware but powered by Creative/THX software. It does give a better definition to treble when enabled, but the sound is vastly disappointing considering the size of the laptop — Asus has cheapened out on speakers.There's an easy access panel underneath, removable with a coin, that gives access to four RAM slots and the two hard drives. With some dexterity you could swap out the wireless card if you want to as well — which is only 2.4GHz; Asus strangely not opting to give power users 5GHz.Ports include an SD card reader, one USB 3.0 port, three USB 2.0 ports, VGA, HDMI and gigabit Ethernet. The front and rear are empty; the rear only featuring one of the most serious air vents we've seen. There's a Blu-ray drive installed here as well, but the overall feeling is how incredibly sparse things are. eSATA is missing, and surely more USB 3.0 ports could have been put in.For the first time in a long time, a Sentelic touch pad has turned up again. Carrying a reputation of making the absolute worst touch pad we've ever used, we were interested to see how the Asus implementation went. To give an idea of how bad things were: people were actually buying OEM parts and replacing the touch pads themselves.Performance issues aside, Sentelic never makes drivers available on its website, and MSI, host of previous Sentelic attempts, never included any driver either, making users scour the web for something to make their lives more bearable. Thankfully, Asus knows how to bundle a driver — even if it is embarrassingly unfinished and terrible to use.There are gestures, but the control panel doesn't actually tell you what they do. It's accompanied by a very amateur video showing you how to do the gesture, but once again, with no information as to what the gesture does.Two-finger tap is middle click, three-finger is right-click and there's a full palm gesture, but who knows what it does. There's pinch-to-zoom and rotate, although this time rotate involves holding the thumb still while the index finger swipes. Two-finger scroll is in, but annoying. By default it's incredibly fast, often zooming to the end of the page, the velocity unchangeable. You're better off using single-finger scroll for normal scrolling.For a gaming notebook the system noise is pleasingly quiet. Even under the maximum load the cooling fans rotate at a rather leisurely pace. The G74SX-91079V is neither clearly audible or even annoying at any time. In an idle state the system noise is also acceptable, whereby there is definitely still room for improvement in light of the heat generated. The US version G74SX-3DE led to slightly higher values in our test. Altogether even noise sensitive users have no cause for concern.In short its very quite under load/gaming.An average of 24°C in an idle state, and 27°C under load, are both exceptionally good. The 'WASD hand' doesn't get uncomfortably warm after several hours either, so there is nothing standing in the way of a lengthy gaming session.Relatively low component temperature. According to the tool HWMonitor, the graphics card and processor temperatures didn't exceed 70°C during the test.Lets take a look at Results of our Tests...