Asus RoG G752Vm

The Asus ROG G752VM is one of the first laptops to offer one of Nvidia’s new generation of graphics cards, which get much closer to offering desktop gaming performance in a normal laptop shell.

It’s the second in this new class we’ve reviewed, but this belongs in a class above the Gigabyte P57 we looked at couple of months ago. While not cheap, the G752VM is a no-compromise machine that is worth saving up those pennies for.

Price

The G752VM reviewed here costs £1,599. It has an Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU, Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU, 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive for all the files you don’t need to access at lightning speed. Right now this is the only spec widely available in the UK.

If you’re after a machine with an even faster graphics card, the model number changes a bit. The G752VS has a GTX 1070 GPU and costs around £2,299. If you have money to burn or are obsessed about frames per second figures, the monster G701VI has the top-end Nvidia GTX 1080 card (£2,889). If all of these are too expensive for your budget, then the FX502VM costs £1,399, has a 3GB GTX 1060 card and some lesser components including a less adept cooling system. It’s also a lot lighter and slimmer.

Design

A new generation of graphics hardware makes the G752VM exciting, but the design is much like the older G752 model we reviewed before Nvidia’s 10-series GPUs arrived. You wouldn’t mistake it for anything but a gaming machine.

The angular two-tone keyboard surround, Matrix-like keyboard font and moody red keyboard backlight tell you this isn’t a laptop designed to be used to check emails in Starbucks. It’s also far too big and heavy to be taken far comfortably.

The G752VM is 43mm thick and weighs 4.06kg. Just the 17in screen footprint alone is enough to make you want to groan every time you have to take it room to room. This isn’t a criticism as such, just a reminder of exactly the kind of laptop we’re looking at. If you want something to entertain during a horribly long work commute, consider getting something much smaller and lighter. This is a performance machine foremost.

Like most gaming laptops, it’s largely made of high-quality plastic rather than the metal used in light lifestyle machines. However, it’s solid throughout and the lid is topped with brushed aluminium for a little show-off extra touch. The colour strips and logo on the lid also light up, a classic gamer gear move, but you can switch these lights off if you like.

One of the main positives of such a large laptop like the G752VM is that it can easily replace a desktop. The screen is huge compared with most laptops and the large frame means Asus has been able to fit in many connections.

Connectivity

There are four USB 3.0 ports, two on each side and a USB-C to let you plug in your peripherals past and future. In a couple of years we may wish Asus had sacrificed another USB for a second USB-C, but at the moment we just don’t know how much life is left in the full-fat plug.

Other connectors include a full-size HDMI, mini DisplayPort and a Gigabit Ethernet socket. There’s also an unusually good array of audio connectors, with separate mic and headphone 3.5mm jacks, plus

The colour strips and logo on the G752VM’s lid also light up, a classic gamer gear move, but you can switch these lights off if you like

a SPDIF output to let you plug in a digital headset without using up a USB. The G752VM has a tray-loader optical drive too, in this case a DVD multi-writer. Asus also offers a Blu-ray drive in other configurations.

Display

Like a lot of gaming laptops, though, the G752’s screen spec may not blow you away. It’s a large 17.3in display, but the resolution is only 1920x1080 pixels. You’ll notice this on the Windows 10 desktop, with text looking pixellated just as it would appear on a 1080p monitor.

However, our review unit’s GTX1060 graphics card is perfectly-suited to 1080p gaming. It has enough power to let you max-out the visuals in current games, where doing to at 4K would be too much of an ask. If you must have ultra-high resolution gaming, check out the Asus ROG GX800, which has an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU and a 4K screen option.

Other than unremarkable resolution this is a good screen. Colour is solid and the matt screen finish takes the edge off reflections. Maximum brightness is excellent too at 354cd/m2. We’ve been using the G752VM as our normal work PC, and even at 40 percent brightness it seems a bit too bright with indoors lighting.

Looking a little deeper, colour and contrast performance are decent, but not at a level that’ll impress design professionals. The G752VM hits 85 percent of the sRGB standard, where at this price you can often get 100 percent. Coverage of the more demanding Adobe RGB and DCI P3 standard are relatively good given the sRGB coverage, though, at 62.5and 71.5 percent respectively.

The slight weak point we actually noticed with the naked eye is contrast. At 569:1 it’s only reasonable, and at higher brightness you’ll see a slight bluish hint to blacks. It’s a good idea to play around with the backlight level to see what best suits your gaming

For an extra shot of gaming cred, the G752VM’s keyboard uses anti-ghosting tech that means it can register up to 30 key presses at once

environment, but this is still a very solid, satisfying screen for gamers.

The display also has G-Sync, Nvidia’s hardware-powered alternative to V-sync, which stops ugly tearing in games. G-Sync gets you the benefits of V-sync without the performance hit.

Keyboard and trackpad

It’s easy to think of the G752VM as a pure performance laptop, and in most respects it is, but there’s attention to detail paid in the keyboard and trackpad too. As in previous high-end G-series laptops, the keyboard keys have greater travel than the average laptop.

They are extremely comfortable to type on, and have meaty resistance that simply feels good. It’s about as far removed as you can get from the ultra-shallow style of Apple’s newer MacBook designs.

The G752VM also has a full numerical pad and a series of custom buttons up above the standard key set. One boots up the XSplit Gamecaster video streaming software, and the other five are customisable macro buttons. You can set your own key sequence for each, or make them launch an app or website, which may be of more interest to those not into competitive gaming.

Aside from their programmability, though, these are normal keys, so you need to remember exactly which button does what. Given how much the OLED shortcut bar adds to the price of the new MacBook Pro, we’ll take the extra brain work involved.

The last bonus button sits in the numberpad: an ROG button that launches the Gaming Center app. This lets you see how hard the CPU and GPU are working and how hot they are. It also lets you turn off the light strip on the back.

For an extra shot of gaming cred, the keyboard uses anti-ghosting tech that means it can register up to 30 key presses at once. It’s techy overkill, the sort of feature you can only test by mashing the keyboard with a palm, but does mean that no keypress will be missed in the heat of the action.

The mouse buttons match the feel of the keyboard too. Instead of being built into the pad they sit below. They’re oversized pads that depress almost as much as the keys but with a lighter feel, a bit like miniaturized space bars. This actually makes them easier to rapidfire tap than a normal mouse button, and gets rid of the problem of awkward-feeling mouse layouts that a lot of larger laptops suffer from.

Its actual pad is large too, though it’s disappointing to see a laptop this high-end use a plastic surface rather than a textured glass one. Your finger doesn’t coast over it as smoothly, even if many people may not notice the difference. This seems to be a nod to the idea most serious gamers will want to use a mouse a lot of the time. This is one of the G752VM’s few weak points. Its greatest strength is performance, although it’s the GPU alone that sets the laptop apart.

Performance

Arriving just before Kaby Lake CPUs were available, the G752VM uses a Skylake-generation CPU, which has

been around for quite some time. It’s an Intel i7-6700HQ, a quad-core CPU with a clock speed of 2.6GHz and a Turbo Boost of 3.5GHz. While we haven’t tested a Kaby Lake laptop yet, it’s unlikely to prove a good reason to wait: we don’t expect a massive performance increase.

This CPU is paired with 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 256GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive for all the data that doesn’t need to be accessed too quickly, like photos, video files and music. The SSD reads at 757MB/s and writes at 749MB/s, so is not an entry-level drive, but also isn’t as fast as the quickest PCIe SSDs.

The companion hard drive reads at 141MB/s and writes at 135MB/s, so while nowhere near as fast as the SSD, it’s a decent 7200rpm model rather than the lumpen sort of drive you’d find in a cheap laptop.

With that out of the way, we can tackle the G752VM’s Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU, the main reason to get excited. The claim for this ‘mid-range’ graphics brain is that it’s 30 percent faster than the GTX 970M, the model up from the last generation of Nvidia laptop cards. It’s a good time for gaming laptops.

It can handle Alien Isolation with all settings maxed-out and resolution set to 1080p at an average 75fps, and at 188fps with the visuals dropped and the resolution at 720p.

It sails through the more challenging Thief too, managing 70fps with all the effects turned up and the resolution at 1080p, and at 80fps with the visual quality dropped.

This is an excellent 1080p gaming laptop, with enough reserves to ensure top-end games will be playable for some time to come.

While there are smaller, lighter laptops with this same CPU including Asus’s own FX502VM, the G752VM has a cooling system designed to take the heat produced with ease. It’s extremely quiet. Like almost any laptop with a high-performance CPU, the fans run constantly, but will be drowned out by even minor ambient noise when you’re just browsing or reading emails.

We were surprised by how well the G752VM copes even after 30 minutes of gaming. It’s a lot quieter than we remember the previous generation of G752 computers. If you’re looking for a laptop you can play for hours without the keyboard getting hot and fans sounding like a Dyson hand-dryer, this is a great option: the best we’ve reviewed to date. You only need to look at its back to see how it words. The chunky rear of the laptop is all-grille, giving the large internal fans room to push out all the hot hair.

Battery life

One element of the G752VM that was never going to be that strong, though, is battery life. Despite using a 14nm CPU, the core components just aren’t designed for battery-saving the way other chipsets are. Used as a normal work PC, with plenty of typing and some browsing the Asus ROG G752VM lasts just over four hours. This is fair longevity for a laptop with these brains, and a sign of the effort Intel and Nvidia have put into improving the efficiency of their processors. But it’s still not going to get you through a day’s work. Playing a looped video at 120cd/m2 brightness, the G752VM lasts three hours 23 minutes, giving you an idea of what it’s capable of when working at a low level consistently. Expect it to last about an hour when gaming

This Asus is an excellent 1080p gaming laptop, with enough reserves to ensure top-end games will be playable for some time to come

flat-out: a reminder that this really isn’t a portable machine.

Audio

This laptop deserves to have some speakers or headphones plugged-in, rather than relying on the internal speakers. While top volume is good and there’s a ‘bass woofer’ driver on the bottom to add some weight to the sound, a coloured mid-range leaves music and speech sounding stilted and unnatural.

Verdict

The Asus ROG G752VM is a terrific gaming laptop for those who want top performance in a form designed to handle that power with ease. It doesn’t get overly hot or loud, making us confident that even the step-up model with the Nvidia GTX 1070 GPU will also be a joy to use. As the prices of top-end style laptops such as the MacBook Pro and HP Spectre 13 increase, the Asus starts to look like an even better buy than 2015’s models. And, as hoped, the latest 10-series Nvidia graphics cards blow away what came before. Despite being two rungs lower, gaming performance is not all that far off the former top dog GTX 980M, and similar to that of the desktop-grade GTX 970. In other words, it’s perfect for 1080p gaming. There are just a few issues. A textured glass (rather than plastic) trackpad would have been appreciated and we’d like to see Asus put a little more work into the sound quality of the speakers, rather than just trying to make them as loud as possible.