ASUS G752VY Review : beast in size and power

When I was a bachelor, I had an assembled desktop computer with ATI Radeon graphics card, lot of memory and an Athlon X2 black edition with unlocked multiplier that made overclockeing a walk in the park. It was absolute fun, using OverDrive to instantly increase the performance of the desktop. Then boast the frame rate of best games that were released that year (though not a match for actual gaming beasts). Those were the years when gaming used to be on three devices. Desktops, consoles and PSP. Gaming on a laptop was laughed at. Today, the story is different. Laptops now come with powerful CPUs and GPUs and have even become modular. ASUS G752VY is one such beast and here is what we think about it.

Key Specification

• Intel Core i7 6700HQ @2.6GHz chip
• Nvidia GeForce GTX980M GPU with 8GB GDDR5 memory
• 16GB of onboard Memory (up to 64GB)
• 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD
• 17.3″ FullHD display
• Full size back-lit keyboard
• Extra large trackpad
• Wide range of ports

Design

While we are seeing brands competing to make laptops half a centimeter thin and less than a kg weight, this one is nearly 5 centimeters thick and tips the scale at nearly 5 kilograms. Forget about keeping this on your lap, you cannot walk more than few steps holding it in your hands. You need a big bag and regular work outs in the gym if you are a frequent traveler. But, the experience that you get is worth that pain.You may have seen a lot of gaming notebooks but we bet you rarely get to see a beast like the ASUS G752VY. The icing on the cake is that you get on board “Republic of Gamers”.  And we are not here to talk about a thin and sexy laptop that ‘may’ do some gaming. We are talking about a laptop that excels at gaming, allows serious overclocking.

The lid of G752VY is made of metal while the base is made of plastic. The rear view is the best view of G752VY. It feels like ASUS took the rear of Mclaren P1, compressed it, added some fins and attached it to the G752VY to create the Vapor Chamber. The Vapor Chamber is connected to copper heat pipe to create efficient cooling system to keep CPU and GPU cool. When the laptop is on and when the rear panel glows, it’s so hard for us to turn the laptop to start using it. IT IS THAT GOOD! The lid has RoG branding and logo, two streaks of orange lines on either side of the logo. These combined with the rear panel makes this one a head turner. Pick a night-time, go to a public place, turn on the laptop and we are pretty sure that every single soul that passes by will give a ‘WHOA! WHAT IS THAT’ look and majority of them will turn red with envy.

The ASUS G752VY is powered by screaming fast 6th Generation Intel Skylake Core i7 processor. The Nvidia GeForce 980M gives enough graphics processing muscle to let you play all latest games at high settings. ASUS allows extreme overclocking of CPU and GPU. These components are cooled using dedicated cooling modules. The exhaust works very well and pushes air through rear vents. The unique design directs dust into a separate dust release tunnel and is pushed out. This helps a lot as dust clogging or slowing down fans is one of the common problems that gamers face. The copper heat pipe transfer heat away from the internal components and the 3D Vapor Chamber at the rear disperse the heat out using powerful fans.

There is 16GB of RAM and you can add up to 64GB of (total) RAM. There is a 512 GB NVM Express SSD that provides extremely high data transfer speed. When compared to traditional AHCI, NVMe based SSDs minimize random read/write latency and this helps a lot in-game loading. Modern games are usually 15GB+ in size and NVMe SSD reduces time taken to load game data from SSD to RAM.

The number of ports available on this beast is overwhelming. On the right hand side, there is power port, RJ45 port to connect wired LAN cable, a HDMI port, mini display port, two USB ports, one USB Type-C port, audio input and output ports. The front and back are clean. On the left hand side, there are two USB ports, DVD drive, media card reader and Kensington lock port.

Turn the notebook upside down and you will see a translucent panel that shows the internal fans spinning. The bay that hosts hard drive and RAM can be accessed easily. Pull out the rubber flap and use it to pull the thin panel that covers the bay. You will then get access to change/add RAM, hard drive.

Display

The 17.3″ matte display panel is one of the best laptop panels that we saw in recent years. The FullHD resolution on a 17.3″ size gives perfect text size unlike those 2K/4K panels on 14″ notebooks. Color accuracy is very good, viewing angles are perfect, thanks to IPS panel. If feels as if there the content is floating and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Windows 10’s clean dark UI elevates this feeling. Thanks to NVIDIA G-SYNC display tech, game play is very smooth as G-SYNC helps avoid lag, frame rate stutter, visual tearing.

The bezels though are very very fat.Apart from the ASUS logo below the display there is no use of chrome on the bezel. ASUS could’ve easily added an 18″ display if they wanted to reduce the bezel size. The size of the bezel is to keep the lid size in-line with the base. This laptop costs nearly 2 lacs and we do miss the lack of touch screen. It was indeed the right call. Capacitive touch screen would need a glass layer. Whatever anti smudge layer is added, gaming experience will take a hit when the laptop is facing a light source. The visibility will go for a toss under direct sunlight.

Keyboard and trackpad

G752VY comes with a full size keyboard with brilliant red back-lighting. The island style keyboard layout has key travel of 2.5mm making it a breeze to use for gaming and for typing. Above the keyboard, there is a dedicated key to launch Split Gamecaster so that you can live stream your gaming session with one click. Above the numpad, there is a dedicated key to launch ASUS RoG Gaming Center. Home, page up, page down, end keys are placed above the numpad which is a bit awkward. Due to this layout, the arrow keys are moved down a bit and are not aligned to the bottom row of the keyboard. The keyboard supports 30-key rollover and has anti-ghosting to give precise control while playing games. Overall the keyboard is very good. ASUS should’ve placed a second LCD display in place of num-pad as even gamers doesn’t care about number pad. And the number crunchers sitting in office cubicles who really need a number pad would never purchase this laptop.The keyboard has back-lighting but only supports red color. ASUS should have taken the Razer way (like Razer Zone) and add full RGB back lighting. Not everyone will be a fan of red color.

The trackpad is super big and is aligned to the qwerty part of the keyboard. Though the trackpad is bit and support tap to click, the accuracy is not up to the mark and the sensitivity is hit and miss. Some times slight tap works while sometimes, we had to tap harder. The right and left keys (below the trackpad) are average and wobble a lot. The notification and status LEDs are placed below the trackpad.

The palm rest area has rubbery material that gives good palm grip. The keyboard is surrounded by brushed aluminum with color that matches the top of the lid. On the bottom right corner, there is a RoG logo. The power key is at the top right corner and is a huge key.

Software and customization

ASUS G752VY comes with wide array of RoG tools to overclock, customize and setup. The problem though is that there is truckload of bloatware and some of these tools are un-necessary. The most important tool among these is the ‘ASUS RoG Gaming Center’. Using this application, you can choose between normal mode or two over clocking modes. You can also load other applications like MacroKey, Splendid, GPU Perf limiter from this app. You can save up to four customized profiles and switch between profiles at the tap of button. The application also shows live GPU and CPU temperatures, frequency and the basic internal configuration (CPU speed, amount of ram used, amount of disk space used etc).

MacroKey is another very useful application. As you may have guessed, the application can be used to configure the MacroKeys on the keyboard.You can record customized instructions for your games. Instructions are :

• Add a profile1 and setting m1/m2/m3/m4/m5.
• If you want to set the M1 to macro mode, please click on the M1 button then click macro icon.
• Press the key combination after the start recording, and then stop recording.
• Click the apply button, and the waiting process bar will appear. While the process bar is gone, the customized instructions will be set into MacroKey completely.
• If you want to add more instructions, you can mouse click the instruction where you want to insert new instructions. If you want to modify the delay time, you can click the instruction and then inputs the time.

If you want to use these keys to launch an application, you can set up accordingly. You can also configure the keys to set up the macro key to launch a web-page/site.

Sonic Radar application lets you setup game equalizer. You can use certain features of the Sonic Radar (eg: in counterstrike, app detects and displays the ticking sound of the time bomb). In short, the application makes one more attentive while playing.

Gaming and Benchmarks

There is barely a matching notebook when it comes to gaming. After going through the pain of carrying the laptop, getting used to the bulk, we expected the laptop to excel at gaming. The ASUS G752VY totally nailed gaming. We played games like Crysis 3, Witcher 3, F1 2016 etc and every thing was at maximum possible settings. The frame rate stayed consistently above 60fps and there was absolutely no lag. Game loading time was impressive.  Unfortunately, we moved to Xbox One to satisfy gaming needs and most PC games that we have are very old games almost a decade ago. For now, we did the testing using Crysis 3, F1 2016, Witcher 3, Splinter Cell. As we get to try more PC gaming, we will evolve our gaming catalog. Here are a few videos of our gaming sessions and we have also listed results from a few benchmarks.

Battery

This is a gaming laptop with top of the line components. Talking about battery backup would mean insulting the brand RoG. If you are not gaming, the battery will easily last more than 2 hours but if you start playing heavy games, the battery will drain at a rapid rate. Also, make sure that you turn on ‘maximum performance’ else all those games will lag a lot while running on battery backup.

Audio

Audio quality is stellar. ASUS G752VY has a bottom firing woofer, two front facing speakers creating a proper 2.1 speaker setup. For a laptop, the audio quality from the sparks is stellar. Connect this to a proper desktop speaker and you get the mind blowing audio experience. ASUS is one of the best PC sound makers in the world and with G752VY, they took native laptop audio quality to next level. With the bundled applications, you can tweak the audio

Conclusion

In trying to be a beast, ASUS created something that is too pricey to be used as a desktop and too heavy to be carried around like a laptop. Those who do not prefer moving their gaming device can get an extremely powerful desktop for 2 lac rupees and those who need gaming on the go will need a huge backpack to fit the G752VY. Once you get used to this laptop, it is very hard to look for another one. ASUS G752VY is not everyone’s cup of tea. It cannot be called a ‘cup of tea’. This one is more like that Spirytus Polish Vodka that overwhelms you with its power. With screaming fast Core i7 and Nvidia GeForce 980M, you can play any game you want, at any setting you want. The built-in SSD+HDD combo is fast yet you get a lot of space to store all of your games. The back-lightning for keyboard lets you game at night and you can have live streaming of your gaming skills to create envy. Every bit of the G752VY screams premium quality. The design is amazing and you will quickly be the center of attention (if you get to carry it around). At close to 2 lac, you may feel it is expensive but it really is worth every rupee if you are only going to play gaming in your home and you need the flexibility of gaming in any room you want and to connect to the living room TV once in a while.

Video Review