 The CM Storm SF17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four-port USB hub. Click now to learn more. Now with all the recent hype about thin and light gaming notebooks, it might be easy for you the viewer to assume that more traditional gaming notebooks aren't relevant anymore. But it's time for a bit of a reality check. Heat is a beach and the fundamental laws of thermodynamics haven't changed lately, so if you want more processing power, you're also going to need to cram more cooling capacity into it. Otherwise, thermal throttling or worse, the eventual degradation of your components can occur. Not likely to be a concern here. This is Asus' latest and greatest from their ROG series, the G750JZ, an aggressively styled gaming notebook that aims to deliver power without compromise in a mobile form factor. Let's start with a physical tour. The top has the same classic black soft touch finish that we've seen in the last few generations of G series models, a plastic chrome Asus logo and a white illuminated Republic of Gamers logo beneath it. I liked this the first time I saw it and I still like it now. Rather than putting colorful LEDs all over it that say, OMG, look at me, I'm high performance. Asus takes a more subtle approach and lets aggressive lines and raw benchmarks do the talking instead. Speaking of aggressive, let's move around to the back where we find two independently controlled cooling fans, each with its own copper heat sink and heat pipe system connecting it to either the CPU or the GPU. In theory, it provides great cooling. In practice, it provides great cooling and surprising acoustics as well. It's pretty much silent, which means a lot coming from me under light workloads and stays reasonable even when you're gaming. I mean, I'm gaming right now. Here's my microphone. Look at that. Very, very nice. Moving around to the left side, we find a Kensington lock, two USB three ports, a DVD writer and Blu-ray reader combo drive and a full size SD card reader. While the front features indicator LEDs for the usual suspects that can be viewed with the lid open or with the lid closed. Then on the right, we find headphone and microphone jacks, two more USB three ports for a total of four, HDMI, hardwired gigabit LAN, VGA, power in and ah, yes, the one I glossed over. That is not mini display port, although it'll work with a display port monitor just fine and even daisy chain. Nope, that is a Thunderbolt port. This is one of the few PC notebooks with Thunderbolt making it a fantastic option for non-gaming folks like creative professionals as well. Imagine as a photographer packing something like this to a wedding, all the CPU power, IO and CUDA acceleration you need with nice, fast photo and video offloading as well. Nice. On the bottom, we find a removable battery and a dedicated subwoofer to go with the effective albeit cryptically placed front speakers that seem to fire out of the rear vents as much as the base of the screen here. And then finally, there's an easy to access door that you can open up to change your RAM, hard drive or either of the two M.2 SSDs that are included. I think it's great that it uses a self retaining screw by the way. That's basically impossible to lose. So yay, but there's not much else of note down here. And now it is time to open this baby up. On the inside, we find more classy styling. The bezel surrounding the G750JZ's 17.3 inch screen is a reasonable size and has no adornments other than a stylized webcam peephole and other plastic chrome ASUS logo and some protective rubber stoppers. And while the 1920 by 1080 resolution TN panel may be a point of contention among folks expecting an IPS panel with a resolution greater than 1080p, ASUS isn't the first manufacturer to sacrifice viewing angles and resolution for the sake of not having to deal with Windows's terrible DPI scaling, better pixel response times and the ability to actually run your games at native res on a mobile GPU. So I guess I see where they're coming from even though it's not a trade off I would personally make if given the choice. Speaking of trade offs, if only I could have the beautiful looks of brushed aluminum on my wrist rest without feeling like I have to clean it every 26 seconds, but there is good news too. The chiclet style keyboard embedded in this brushed aluminum finish here is a very solid implementation with longer than usual travel distances for the keys, a vibrant white backlight so you can see what you're doing in the dark and a pretty darn standard layout that other than lengthening the right control doesn't try to do anything crazy. Just the way I like it. The nice big touchpad is also thoughtfully made with a great texture on its plastic surface, a stylish chrome beveled edge and a very satisfying, hear that? Mechanical click to the dedicated non-click pad buttons. Again something that I prefer. So with the physical tour out of the way, let's talk about the specs of the G750JZ. I mean all that babbling about processing power and cooling during my intro, I better be ready to back it up with some beefy numbers right? Yeah don't worry we got beefy numbers. First up is Intel's Core i7-4700HQ, a quad core 8 thread monster that runs at 2.4GHz base and up to 3.4GHz with turbo boost. It's matched with 24GB of DDR3-1600 RAM so whether you're using this machine for gaming, hardcore chrome tab abuse or even video editing, you will have CPU power and RAM to spare. And next up is the other big star of the show, an overclocked Nvidia GTX 880M. This graphics card has a fully enabled GK104 GPU in it that actually runs at darn near the same specs as Nvidia's desktop enthusiast grade GTX 770. One key difference though is that our mobile graphics card trades some memory speed for a larger 4GB frame buffer. This will be a boom when running higher quality textures but it will reduce performance somewhat in other situations. But of course when I talk about performance reductions I mean compared to graphics cards that are about as thick as this entire notebook and go in a desktop PC. The rest of the unit ain't too shabby either and as I was going through making a little list for myself so I didn't miss anything, you got your dual 128GB SSDs that can be configured and raided for boot although strangely they came unrated out of the box for me, a 1TB mechanical storage drive, onboard killer N wireless, I started thinking to myself how does this compare to buying a desktop? In the old days a gaming notebook was heavy, loud, sucked battery like there was no tomorrow and finally didn't even perform very well. Well now that's changed a fair bit and aside from the 4770K being a fair bit faster than the 4700HQ that's in this notebook, the rest of this stuff is actually pretty close to the hardware you'd use in a typical custom desktop. I mean not exactly mind you, I'd make some different choices for sure but I still thought this would be an interesting exercise so here's what I came up with. I decided to put together a desktop configuration that in spite of some approximations, so for example I went with an 18 inch LCD and the cheapest reasonable quality UPS I could find as an equivalent for the notebook's 17.3 inch screen and built in battery and then I took all that stuff and like threw in a $50 charge like what NCIX charges for PC assembly and with the overall goal not of achieving perfect equivalency in every detail but rather of building a desktop that was of similar spec, features and quality compared to my notebook, I wanted to see what the difference in price came out to be and what the difference in performance came out to be. Surprisingly for performance parity with similar grade components it was only about a $200 difference or about 10% and here are a couple of little performance benchmarks so when you look at how closely it performs, I mean yeah it's not as good. Let's be realistic here, a gaming laptop is not going to be as good as a desktop from a price to performance ratio but compared to the way it used to be, if you're willing to sacrifice that upgradeability for portability it's not nearly as bad as it used to be. Which I guess leads us naturally into our conclusion, who is this product for? Does the G750JZ fill a useful niche as an in-between option amongst the sexy slim gaming notebook and big non-portable gaming desktop options out there? I'd say yes, yes it does. At 4.8kg it's not light enough that I'd want to go backpacking up a mountain with it but it sure beats the heck out of trying to lug desktops around if you're like us and frequently filming on location and if you combine that with the fact that it's much less expensive, quieter and runs cooler than high powered slim gaming notebooks out there and is much more portable than that valued gaming desktop whose performance it came surprisingly close to, I think we've got ourselves a serious contender for your money if you want a portable workstation slash gaming rig that you don't need to carry around with you all the time. Anyway guys thanks for watching, my team and I worked hard on this video, we hope you enjoyed it if you did please like and share it and if you didn't please dislike it and leave a comment with your thoughts, we do take constructive criticism very seriously. Also linked in the video description is a support us link to buy t-shirts, give us a monthly contribution or use our affiliate code when you buy random stuff on Amazon but no pressure because whether you like us or not we're going to keep making videos about technology on the YouTube so peace out guys and thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe.