 The Republic of Gamers G550 JK from ASUS. Aside from being the notebook that holds the world record for the highest altitude terrestrial land party, yeah, that's right, ten of these bad boys ascended to the top of Mount Albert as part of a collaboration between Tech Syndicate, Austin Evans, and Newegg, and us, where we all played Doom at 14,400 feet, but aside from that, it's actually a fairly down-to-earth gaming laptop with a premium mainstream price, girl-next-door good looks, and solid build quality. With its power loss protection, affordability, and performance, the SP920 from ADATA makes upgrading to an SSD remarkably safe and simple. Hardware-wise, the G550 JK is appropriately equipped for the price. The Core i7-4710HQ quad-core is suitable for gaming and light content creation. The single 8GB stick of RAM is enough for gaming, but would love to have a dual-channel partner for a total of 16GB for heavier work. The GTX850M GPU will be enough for light to medium gaming duties, and the 750GB 7200RPM hard drive strikes a good balance between storage space and cost. And then, of course, there's the usual wireless AC, Bluetooth webcam, etc. Now, the keen-eyed among you might have already started noticing some similarities between this and the N550 JK also from ASUS. And if you did, then bravo, Watson, because they are indeed very closely related. But for those of you not familiar with the N550, we'll do a physical overview. The back of the screen has a beautiful brushed aluminum finish that's actually surprisingly easy to clean, so definitely brownie points there, not quite sure how they did it. Other than that, all you'll find back there is a reflective ASUS logo and an illuminated Republic of Gamers one. On the bottom, we find two cooling intakes for the dual-fan cooling system that is nearly silent at idle, reasonably quiet under load, and does a great job of keeping the laptop cool. Our GPU stayed around 80 degrees running Unigine Heaven, even with the overclock option enabled in GPU tweak, and more importantly, the GPU was running consistently at around 1.17 GHz. Also on the bottom, we find a very large speaker grille with four drivers behind it that must be contributing to the surprisingly loud and solid content consumption experience, especially given the Notebook Slim 1.1-inch form factor, because let's face it, when it comes to speakers, there's only so much you can do within a confined space, and I was impressed, but then I guess ASUS knows that too, because they also included this Sonic Master external subwoofer thing. It's not the kind of thing I imagine I'd use very often, but it actually does dramatically improve the performance of the already above-average built-in speakers. Onto the sides, we get an SD card reader, a USB 3.0 port, a DVD writer, and a Kensington lock. Then on the left side, we've got a headphone slash microphone jack, two more USB 3.0 ports, display port, and HDMI video outputs, a hardwire ethernet port, and finally the 1.8-inch jack for the external sub, and then finally power in. And it might seem like a trivial detail, but the red beveled edge here above the ports actually looks even more striking in person than it does on video. It looks really, really nice. But just like for people, a notebook's looks can only get it so far. And once we open this baby up, we find the stuff that really matters, and it looks like we're gonna start on a high note. My biggest complaint about the last G-Series notebook that we checked out was the TN screen that suffered from some wicked color shift. ASUS has done away with that on the G550JK and gone with a matte finish 15.6-inch 1080p IPS screen instead. It may not have the most amazing contrast ratio in the world, and an IPS display won't give you the same lightning-fast pixel response times that a TN will, but the viewing angles are solid, colors pop like they just aren't able to on a TN, and I even found it quite usable outdoors as long as I kept the screen out of super bright direct sunlight on top of a mountain. And the good news keeps coming. The red LED backlit chiclet keyboard has three brightness levels and is set into a pretty solid aluminum wrist rest that is aluminum, so is going to stain eventually, but thankfully uses a more matte-style anodized finish that is much easier to clean and more resistant to wear than some of the other finishes that I've seen on notebook wrist rests over the past few years. Aside from the keyboard, we've got a power button, a perplexing dedicated button to access the web storage that ASUS includes with the notebook, and a clickpad. The clickiness of the pad is actually a bit too stiff for my tastes, but it's kind of academic since I prefer touch-to-click or pressing the proper clicky buttons at the bottom anyway. The big thing I look for in a touchpad is its ability to reject my fingers and my palms when I'm trying to use it two-handed or when I'm trying to type, and in this regard, it performs admirably. It also supports the usual gestures through ASUS's utility, one of the many mostly useful things that ASUS pre-installs on the notebook, including a facial unlock utility, a USB charging utility, and their Power 4 Gear power management utility. The only really questionable pre-install items I removed right away were a trial of McAfee LiveSafe and some wild tangent game thing. Battery life was about what I expected. The notebook lasted for 57 minutes, running heaven, starting with a full charge, but of course, with a more typical workload, NVIDIA's Optimus technology hands off display duties to the onboard graphics, which allowed it to last for just shy of three hours when browsing the internet, listening to music, watching YouTube videos, something that I'd consider to be a fairly heavy and yet not gaming workload. So gone are the days of tolerating half an hour battery life from our, you know, high-powered desktop replacement and gaming notebooks. Which I guess leads us into our conclusion about the G550JK. This isn't really a little brother to the beastly G750JZ, so much as it's more like a sexier trim level of the N550. The 750 is kind of like the 6 Series in the family, and this is more like the 3 Series, if we were to make a car analogy. It's still tuned, it's still fun to drive, but its overclocked GTX 850M is not in the same league as an overclocked 880M, which raises an interesting question. What is the competition for this notebook? The GE60 Apache from MSI features GDDR5 memory for improved graphics performance, and an RGB backlit keyboard that comes at the cost of extra thickness. And Asus' own N550JK has a touchscreen, but a slower CPU and only a 5400 RPM, albeit higher capacity hard drive. So that's where the G550JK comes in. It's got its own set of compromises. I mean, I'd have liked to see an SSD instead of a hard drive, or at least an MSATA or M.2 upgrade slot, but it's beautiful and solidly built, it delivers very respectable specs for the price, and that's not a bad place to be. Speaking of not bad places to be, this one was at the top of a mountain setting a world record, and we are giving it away to one of you. Now, as you may have already noticed during the B-roll for this video, it is covered with a whole bunch of cool signatures from people who were also at the top of the mountain, including Logan and Kane from Tech Syndicate, Paul and Kyle from Newegg, Austin from... Austin Evans, and of course me and Luke from the show you're watching right now. So guys, check out the link in the video description for details on how you can win this bad boy. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment under the video if you have suggestions for future videos or just generally comments. Also, check out the link in the video description for our sponsor as well as how to support us, so you can send us a monthly contribution, you can buy cool t-shirts like this one, or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff. That pretty much wraps it up guys, thank you for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already.