ASUS ROG G750JZ Pro Reviews

An absolute monster of a gaming laptop, but let down by a lacklustre screen

The Asus ROG G750JZ-XS72 delivers high-end gaming performance, and it comes at a high-end price.

It's expensive, but the Asus G750JZ delivers the goods for gaming performance. You can find similar performance at a lower price, but features such as its Blu-ray drive, 2.1 speakers, and Thunderbolt interface mean that the G750JZ is also well-equipped for other types of entertainment, as well as demanding tasks such as video-editing and audio-recording work.

Gamers with deep pockets have a lot of options, including Alienware, Origin PC, Maingear, and others. Asus has always made great gaming laptops, and can offer some tweaks hard to find elsewhere because the company designs and builds its own chassis, with excellent cooling systems and reasonably low fan noise. In the G750JZ, you'll find some useful GPU-overclocking software, decent subwoofer-driven sound, a Blu-ray burner, and plenty of ports. But the real reason this laptop got me excited was the chance to test-drive Nvidia's new GTX 880M graphics card. Still, $2,999 is a lot to invest (as is $2,499 for a slightly stripped-down model), when you get a decent-but-pedestrian screen that lacks touch or higher resolutions -- both features I would want in such an expensive piece of hardware.

All in all, it's easy to praise the G750JZ-XS72 (with, as we said, the mental reservation that those who don't need to burn DVDs and for whom 24GB of RAM is ample can save $500 by stepping down to the DS71). Probably in three years we'll be celebrating similar frame rates in something as svelte as an ultrabook, but for now, as long as you're shopping the superheavyweight gaming category, it's hard to do better. Ultimate? Probably no. Editors' Choice? Easy yes.