Another week, another gaming notebook. Life at the Stuff offices sure is tough for someone who wants nothing more than to wade through meetings for 90% of the day. Luckily there’s nobody like that working here.
Instead Stuff is populated with the sort of person who delights in grabbing a gaming notebook like the Asus ROG GL752VW, loading up a few games and fragging away for the best part of the day. And calling it work. Hey, someone has to do it, right?
Inside Plain Covers
We’ve used a fair few of Asus’s notebooks and, by and large, they all look the same. A slate-grey casing, a darker interior and keyboard area with red trim wherever it can be squeezed in is the order of the… past few years, actually.
The 17.3-inch HD display is bright enough to keep you gaming without squinting, certainly, and the Asus ROG GL752VW is packing all of the ticks you’re looking for. HDMI-out, several USB powers on the sides for the inevitable gaming peripherals, and an actual optical drive (which we’re probably never going to use), joined by an ethernet port and headphone and mic inputs. You know, the gaming basics.
Start The Engine
We don’t need the exterior to consist of all bells and whistles though. It’s what is inside the decidedly unremarkable chassis that should be of interest and here the Asus ROG GL752VW does pretty well. It’s another of the fresh copy of portable Skylake hardware to enter South Africa, with the now-familiar Core i7-6700 HQ 2.60GHz processor taking pride of place in the GL752’s spec sheet.
Our review model shipped with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, which was partitioned into a 400GB boot drive and 600GB storage section. Sadly there was no SSD boot drive speed boost, something that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing from gaming notebooks of late.
Then there is the GPU, which was the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M. On the scale of awesome the 960M is sitting squarely in the ‘average’ bracket. If you’re after truly powerful portable gaming then the GTX 980M is your port of call right now. All the bits, taken as a whole, give quite the performance though.
Unigine Dreaming
In between roaming around in XCOM 2 looking for Sectoids to dissect, we found enough time to subject the Asus ROG GL752VW to a battery of tests. As has been customary of late we hit this notebook with four tests; two from Unigine’s Heaven benchmark and two from Unigine’s Valley software.
The results were pleasing enough for almost any gamer. A Heaven test at 1,920×1,080, on High, with 8x anti-aliasing enabled, returned an average frame rate of 28.9. The lowest that the GL752 dipped was 7.8 frames and it spiked at 50.2fps. We’ll take those numbers. Switching it up to 1,920×1,080, Ultra, no AA, returned an average fps of 36.8 and a max score of 66.7. That’s a lot more like it. Final score for the second Heaven test? 927.
Moving to Valley, the first test (1,920×1,080, High, 8x AA) gave us a 21.4fps average and a score of 896. The second (1,920×1,080, Ultra, no AA) jumped to 34.5 in the average column and a max of 61. Score = 1,442. Not a bad performance but it still won’t be enough for some gamers. You know who you are and what you’re looking for: that magical 60fps average, right?
Verdict
Asus’s gaming rig doesn’t advertise what is has on the inside and it doesn’t has to. The performance is what counts here and that alone makes the ROG GL752VW worth paying for. In keeping with 17-inch gaming laptops, you’re going to be paying in the region of R30,000 for one of these, which isn’t a wrench. If you’re one of those after the magical 60 frames per second machines then you can expect to add at least another R20k to that price. ‘Extremely playable’ sounds rather good compared to ‘Angels are licking out eyeballs’ at this point.
