Asus G55V ROG Laptop Review
I’m a little late to the game on this one, I know. However, I managed to buy it at a screaming deal from a seller on Craigslist. This laptop came with a 750gb HDD, (a rather random size in my opinion) 12gb of RAM, and a built-in Nvidia GPU (GeForce GTX 660M). And right away, you know this thing was made for gamers.
My first impression was man, this thing is an absolute brick! It is heavy, with a weight of over 5 pounds! The bulk of that is from the rather hefty battery, and all the internal cooling it has going on inside. The bottom of the laptop would occasionally get hot, but it never came close to overheating regardless of what I threw at it.
The back end of it is to thank for that, especially once you notice how they have the heat ports set up. On the bottom is a small hatch of sorts, which provides easy access to the HDD and RAM slots.
Outside of that, all the USB ports, of which there are several are also all USB 3.0. A nice and speedy addition that I had not been expecting when I initially bought it. There are also ports for HDMI, VGA, a Mini Display Port, Gigabit LAN, and audio jacks.
The keyboard has a dedicated number pad to the side, and due to a slightly wider than average size does not end up feeling cramped. I have spent hours typing on it and not only is it one of the better laptop keyboards I have used and it is also backlit!
The screen is 1080p and looks good indoors, though I am not sure it would be bright enough for outdoor use. Of course, lugging something this heavy for a simple outdoor gaming session would not be on the docket for most people.
The processor is an Intel i7-3610QM quad-core. It has a base clock speed of 2.3 GHz with an auto-turbo boost feature that will ratchet it up to 3.3 GHz. It performed well on the bench tests.
Cinebench R10 Rendering Single 32Bit – 4358
Cinebench R10 Rendering Multiple CPUs 32Bit – 7114
Cinebench R10 Shading 32Bit – 6317
Cinebench R10 Rendering Single CPUs 64Bit – 5509 Points
Cinebench R10 Rendering Multiple CPUs 64Bit – 20630 Points
Cinebench R10 Shading 64Bit – 6213 Points
Cinebench R11.5 OpenGL 64Bit – 42.41 fps
Cinebench R11.5 CPU Multi 64Bit – 6.16 Points
The HDD is the weak link on this machine and the item that slows it down the most. I would suggest upgrading from this one as soon as possible.
The Nvidia graphics card performs admirably and can play all my MMO games on high without a problem or noticeable stutters.
This brings me back to its main purpose gaming. Is it a replacement for your desktop? No. Is this a perfect gaming laptop? Again, no. Is it better than anything else I could have gotten for a similar price? Absolutely!
Joshua Kern 