Asus G750JZ review

Asus’s Republic of Gamers (ROG) range of PCs, laptops and components are all premium gaming machines for those with a huge budget. The ROG G750JZ typifies this brand, coming in the form of an audaciously expensive and bulky desktop replacement machine.

The custom-designed chassis is one of the biggest we’ve seen from a gaming laptop. It weighs a hefty 4.8kg, and it’s nearly 6cm tall at its thickest point. Despite these gigantic proportions, the G750JZ looks exciting. We like the matt black lid and the cool-to-the-touch metal palm rest. The vents on the rear have a space-age feel to them, too, and are the one piece of flair in what is otherwise an understated piece of design.

Build quality is also to a very high standard. The palm rest slopes downwards, so while the laptop is huge, the amount of distance from the desk to the keyboard is significantly less than with other large gaming laptops. The keyboard is very pleasant to type on, and the Chiclet-style keys provide a fair amount of travel and feedback. Perhaps more surprising is the quality of the touchpad. Touchpads are largely superfluous on a gaming laptop because most gamers will use a proper gaming mouse. However, the G750JZ gets bonus points for having a responsive touchpad and satisfying physical buttons. Our only complaint about build quality relates to a loosely fitted plastic screen bezel, which is bends along its bottom edge and feels cheap.

There are plenty of ports around the edge of the chassis, including four USB3 ports, an SD card reader, separate headphone and microphone jacks and even a Blu-ray drive. There are VGA, HDMI and even Thunderbolt display outputs, too. Thunderbolt can also be used to connect peripherals such as external hard drives. There’s a built-in Wi-Fi adaptor and a gigabit Ethernet port too.

PERFORMANCE

The G750JZ uses a quad-core Intel Core i7-4860HQ, which has a base clock speed of 2.4GHz and a Turbo Boost clock speed of 3.6GHz when thermal conditions allow. This chip can support up to 32GB of memory, and the G750JZ comes close to fulfilling that potential with a massive 24GB of RAM. The G750JZ scored an impressive 98 overall in our PC benchmark tests, and an excellent 105 in the multitasking segment of the tests. This really is a desktop-replacement laptop.

However, gaming performance is where the G750JZ truly shines. It’s the second laptop we’ve reviewed that uses Nvidia’s top-end GeForce GTX 880M graphics processor (GPU). The first laptop we reviewed with this GPU on board was the Schenker XMG P504, and in our challenging Crysis 3 benchmark it managed an average frame rate of 45.2fps. The Asus managed a marginally better 47fps, but this is a very minor difference.

Game loading times and performance will also be helped by the 256GB SSD, but you also get ample mechanical storage in the form of a 1.5TB hard disk.

DISPLAY

With all that graphics power, gaming laptops need a good screen to make the most of a game’s sumptuous visuals. The panel on the G750JZ performs fairly well in purely quantitative testing. Our colour calibrator showed it was able to display 87.7 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is above average for a laptop. Its contrast level of 576:1 isn’t as high as we’d have liked, and when playing Crysis 3 there were plenty of moments where some finer details weren’t visible to us. This isn’t helped by narrow viewing angles; you’ll have to carefully adjust the angle of the screen before embarking on a mammoth gaming session. The screen is by no means bad (it’s pretty good for a laptop), but it is the weakest part of the G750JZ.

We were impressed with the built-in speakers, though, with their deep and clear sound at medium volume levels. TV, music and action-heavy games all sounded well-balanced. They’re by no means a replacement for external desktop speakers, but they’ll suffice if you’re on the move.

We normally round off a gaming laptop review by reporting some atrocious battery life figures, but the Asus G750JZ shocked us when what we expected to be a two-hour battery rundown test turned into a 4h40m marathon. At 4.8KG, you certainly won’t be using the Asus G750JZ on the daily commute, but at least you can unplug it if you need to move into another room, perhaps to show a funny photo or video to a family member.

The Asus G750JZ is an expensive gaming laptop, but if you want a machine that achieves the highest levels of performance that you can take to the occasional gaming event, the Asus G750JZ is the laptop for you. If you want something a little thinner, the Aorus X7 is a good alternative, being extremely sleek and powerful, even though it has two GeForce GTX 860M GPUs working in SLI mode.