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You're looking at pretty much the mother of all gaming notebooks.
Today we're going to take a look at the G71-Gx by Asus.
Very, very sick, sick little puppy.
This thing is nasty.
Quad cores, six GB of RAM, GTX 260 Mobile,
1920 x 1200, it weighs like eight pounds,
I mean, look at its power charger,
I mean, it's actually a power brick, it's the size of a brick,
it's incredible.
This thing is hardcore powerful.
If you want to play video games, if you want to do some serious multimedia stuff,
if you want to play Blu-rays,
I mean, if you want every feature,
under the sun,
in your laptop, this is probably going to be something for you.
It's impressive to say the least.
Let's go ahead and start talking about it.
First of all, let's start off with the display as usual,
it's a 17 inch display 1920 x 1200,
that makes it WUXGA, very, very nice panel.
Very bright, great color uniformity,
very fast refresh rate,
plays games obviously incredibly,
that's what it's meant to do.
So very, very nice as far as that goes.
It does have Q9000 so that would be, as far as I'm concerned,
the first quad core laptop I've ever actually messed with.
So you do have six MB of L2 cache,
you have a 1066 MHz front side bus,
two GHz four cores,
very, very nice processor.
Also, it has a couple features on it that will let you underclock it,
to save some battery power.
In case you are using that battery
and instead of being plugged in and you want to save battery
you can drop it down from 2.0 to 1.6,
gives you a little, tiny bit more power,
so that's nice.
On top of all of that,
all that processor you also have six GB of RAM,
which is quite a bit, that's a lot of memory to run on any notebook,
and on a gaming notebook it's even more.
It's just a lot, a lot of memory.
Six GB of RAM, and obviously to deal with that you have a 64-bit copy of
Vista Home Premium on here, and it does include the free upgrade
to Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium,
as soon as that comes out next month.
So keep that in mind you will be using Vista at first,
but you can upgrade to Windows 7 for free,
and you don't have to worry about that cost.
Now, besides that, you have two 320 GB hard drives,
that are on here, giving you a total of 640,
which is a lot of connectivity,
I'm sorry a lot of storage, a lot of capacity.
Just tons and tons of storage for a laptop regardless of how big it is,
640 is ridiculous.
Now those do not operate in RAID.
Keep that in mind, that they are two separate drives,
and they are partitioned separately.
Ironically enough, Asus decided to partition it in four separate drive ledgers
which I'm not really sure why they did that,
but of course you can change that, it's up to you.
But just so you know RAID is not there.
Now, let's take a look around the outside of this thing,
now first of all, I guess I should show you the front,
because it's pretty impressive.
What you're looking at right here is the Republic of Gamers logo.
So that's really, really sweet.
You have the Asus logo up here on the top as well.
And you will notice that you do have lights lighting up all around the edges on here.
The logo lights up, pretty much everything
on this thing, lights up.
You also have lights on the front, down here.
Which is kind of interesting.
So you can also control these lights as you please,
so don't think they're going to be on all the time.
If you want to turn off the one around the trackpads,
the one down here, the ones in the front,
you can make them so they blink,
you can make them so only a few of them turn on,
you can make it so they all turn on,
or you can turn them all off if you just want to be quiet and not bother anybody.
But, if you like attention, bright blinking lights are going to help you get attention,
especially when they're on your laptop,
some place where they're not supposed to be.
Now besides that, very generous trackpad,
works nice, side scrolling.
Buttons are a little stiff,
but very nice and they'll probably loosen up.
Great keyboard, you do have a number pad.
Basic layout is very nice.
You have some push buttons up here.
I don't know if you can see them but touch screen media interfaces.
Basically, they're going to bring up different things you can program
to do whatever you want.
One of them turns of the trackpad,
one turns on Express Gate,
but you also have a couple utilities that it can bring up,
which will let you go through your LED modes,
also let you control your screen and let you control the lights,
for this little utility that Asus provides you.
It will also underclock your CPU from that one button as well.
You can basically bring up their little CPU overclocking utility,
and then just bring it down to 1.6 to save some battery.
Now, this thing comes with an eight-cell battery.
But, as you can imagine with a uad core and GTX 260 Mobile
with a GB of DDR3 frame buffer,
that it's going to melt through that battery really quick and it does.
You can probably get just shy of two hours battery
if you underclock it
and, you know, bring the screen down.
So, definitely, and that's not even under low.
So if you're going to game on this thing,
it's going to eat it up real quick.
But, very powerful and again it's not meant to be portable
and battery powered, it's meant to be powered by the wall.
It's a desktop replacement, it's huge.
Now, let's keep going.
I'll give you a quick tour.
I'm going to start you over here,
because one of the main features of this thing is right over here.
And I'll pop it out.
This is your BD drive.
So you do have Blue-ray on here.
It's a 2x Blu-ray player, but it is also a CD and DVD burner,
so it's super multi optical,
it'll do just about everything.
It'll play Blue-rays and then it'll burn plus Rs, minus Rs, RAMs, ROMs,
all that stuff for CDs and DVDs.
But it will not burn a Blu-ray.
So just keep that in mind, now while you're shopping.
Also, come over here, you're going to see that you do have a SD card slot,
it's actually a multimedia card slot.
I believe it is actually an 8-in-1,
so it's going to do pretty much all your MS, your MS Pros,
and your Sony Stick Pro Duos.
If you open down this little door over here,
you have an iLink FireWire,
and you have two USB 2.0 ports.
They are shielded by this little cap so you don't even see them.
You also got a two mega pixel webcam,
which is a little better than the 1.3s you're used to seeing on notebooks.
Now when you move over here,
you do have a few things in the front,
nothing really too significant.
But you will see that you have very nice speakers.
Right next to these lights.
You have the release latch for your screen,
more speakers, more lights,
and that brings us over here to this side.
Now, on this side, you have quite a few things going on.
Here's your express card slot,
a 54 mm, so if you wanted to add a 54 mm express card
you can, whether it be a TV tuner, or a fiber card, it's really up to you.
You can do whatever you want.
This is your WiFi button.
Turn your WiFi on and off.
And over here, you have two USB 2.0 ports,
and you also have a microphone, a headset,
and an additonal headset which is also an SP-DIF,
in case you want to multi channel sound out.
And this is not over yet, there's more on the back.
So check out the back, kind of, people have been moving things to the sides lately,
Asus kept it simple.
Everything on the back, so really nice.
Power, obviously is going to come in over here,
this is your fan louver,
this is all the heat from the CPU coming out through there.
You have HDMI, which is very nice.
You have eSATA, you have VGA,
you have ten, one hundred, one thousand Ethernet,
and you have a Kensington lock space right there.
So a lot of really cool stuff.
It's also important to note on this very large notebook,
you do have Express Gate,
so if you want to log onto the web real quickly,
use chat, use Skype, browse the web,
play some online games, do stuff like that, you can do that.
Boots up into Express Gate in about eight seconds,
whereas the laptop takes about a minute.
So very, very nice the Express Gate feature on there,
if you want to turn something on real quick,
uses a lot less batterty when it's using Express Gate,
so really good as far as that's concerned.
And basically, the only things that I'm missing here,
are N-Drive wireless which I did not mention,
and that's it.
N Drive wireless and ten, one hundred, one thousand Ethernet,
GTX 260 Mobile, with a GB of DDR3,
a Q9000 quad core processor,
1920 x 1200 display,
I mean, this thing's got it all if you want just huge desktop replacement,
lots of gaming, lots of multi media, video editing.
This thing will do just about everything you could ever want it to do.
Very powerful, it's the G71Gx,
and this is the A1 variant with the quad core,
not the dual core, keep that in mind,
and before I let you go,
real quick,
very nice bag they give you to carry with it.
Check this out, lots of really nice detail.
Very nice bag.
And, still not over,
if I can just find it.
Where did it go?
Oh, there it is.
Very nice, Republic of Gamers Asus mouse.
It's basically a Copperhead by Razor,
Asus logo, Asus Republic of Gamers logo on there.
Very, very sweet mouse.
So, a little added bonus there.
if you have any questions on the G71,
feel free to email me,
and I'll see you guys next time.
For more information on the Asus G71Gx 17-inch Gaming Notebook,
type in A50-17008 into the search engine of any of these major retailers.
For Computertv, I'm Albert.