ASUS G75VW: an Ivy Bridge gaming notebook with attitude

The ASUS G75VW Republic of Gamers laptop is designed for users who want a portable gaming machine with lots of attitude, and plenty of power under the hood! It's a 17 inch model that feels very solidly built and it sports a third generation Intel Core i7 (Ivy Bridge) CPU. The model we have here ships with a Core i7-3610QM CPU, 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM (1600MHz), two 1TB hard drives and a GeForce GTX 670M graphics adapter with 3GB of memory.
It screen has a native 1920x1080 resolution and it supports 3D. It ships with a pair of NVIDIA's 3D Vision active shutter glasses.
The lid of the notebook looks and feels great and the rear of the chassis has large air vents that are meant to channel the design of a supercar.
You can see that the G75 has a profile that angles down towards the front, giving it a sporty look. The left side has two USB 3.0 ports, an optical drive that can play Blu-ray discs, an SD card reader and separate microphone and headphone ports.
The right side features two more USB 3.0 ports, DisplayPort, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, VGA and power ports.
We really like the keyboard on this laptop. It feels solid, the keys have good travel, and most importantly, they are backlit! You also get good separation between the arrow keys, the main keyboard and the number pad.
Here's the backlight in action!
The Synaptics touchpad is smooth and it has dedicated buttons.
The Republic of Gamers logo is elegantly etched into the lid below the ASUS branding.
The design is quite angular overall and we think it looks great. It's also solidly constructed; here you can see one of the hinges that holds the big screen in place.
Another angle of the angles that are present in this design. Incidentally, all of the ports are of the USB 3.0 variety.
The bottom of the unit has one large access panel that is held by one screw. It can be quite tough to remove.
Once it's off, it exposes the RAM slots...
As well as two hard drives (one was a system drive and the other a data drive). Both drives were conventional, 5400rpm, 1TB models, but 7200rpm models or an SSD and 5400rpm combo are options.
Here you can see the heat pipes that are used to transfer heat away from the CPU and graphics adapter. There is a fan in the corner that disperses warm air out through the exhaust.
Another fan and exhaust is located on the other side.
You also get a little sub-woofer to help bolster the unit's sound output.
The battery is puny compared to the overall size of the notebook, but it has eight cells and a 74 Watt-hour rating. With a unit this big though, there probably won't be many instances where you use it away from the vicinity of a power outlet. Look out for the full review soon.

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