The laptop is their [ASUS] mid-tier mid-priced 17-inch gaming laptop. It’s from the ROG line, so the republic of gamers line, and its new for 2015. It’s not replacing a 2014 model or anything. It’s got skylake. It’s got a bunch of cool features if you take a look.
Design
The package comes in a big red box with a handle and inside you get the laptop itself, Some pamphlets some accessories like a cable tie and a cleaning cloth, and the AC adapter. The top surface of the laptop is aluminum. It actually comes in a plastic version but this one is aluminum and it feels pretty nice, and it doesn’t show fingerprints readily. There’s a pretty large ASUS logo up front as well as a ROG logo and this lights up from the back lighting of the screen. The Brightness of the screen affects the brightness of the logo.
Hardware
The bottom of the Laptop is plastic and this obviously feels way less premium but it’s very Rigid and it’s durable. There’s also a subwoofer up top and there’s 4 Rubber feet which are for grip. There’s a hatch that you can open up when you remove a couple of screws and then when you do, you have access to two memory slots and hard drive which you can easily upgrade. There’s also an area for a second drive and this would be for the M.2 pcie stick. You can put in some really fast drives in there, so if you’re doing video editing or if you’re recording some gameplay footage, having a second drive is nice, but if you don’t need a secondary Drive, you can always put in a Caramilk bar. No, I’m kidding it should be a crispy crunch. ? The screen has some flex. It’s not any more than I’d expect and actually, for screen this wide, I kind of expected it to be more flexible so it’s not that bad. The chassis is solid. The whole keyboard area doesn’t have much flex and the Hinge also feels well made. It’s covered with a piece of plastic but it feels Strong. Going around the sides, on the left side, you get the power connection with a huge exhaust vent, mini display port, HDMI port, Ethernet jack, a USB 3 and lastly, a USB 3.1 type-c port. On the right side, it has a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a pair of USB 2 ports and a DVD drive. The configuration I’m reviewing has a skylake quad i7 running at 2.6 Gigahertz, a 17.3 inch 1080p screen, a GTX 960m with 2GB of video ram, 16 GB of ddr4 ram and a 1TB hard drive and all this is going for a round of a thousand dollars. It’s a pretty large laptop it actually doesn’t fit any of the bags that I have. You really need like a dedicated 17-inch laptop bag or laptop sleeve to hold this Thing. Upon opening it up, the palm rest is a really smooth plastic material and it Shows fingerprints and smudges a little more than I’d like. The keyboard is okay, I mean I’ve used several keyboards with this kind of layout like the UX 501, the g501 and the MSI p60. So, I’ve gotten used to this kind of split but if you’re new to this kind of layout, it’s a little disorienting at first. That whole number pad thing shifts everything Over to the left. So, if you’ve never used one before, it takes a little bit of time to get used to it. The arrow keys can feel a little weird because it’s surrounded so tightly by other keys but typing on it isn’t bad. It’s got 1.8 Millimeters of travel which feels good and the three-stage back lighting is bright but it’s red. So, if red isn’t your thing, you won’t love it. The trackpad is okay. It actually feels a lot like the track pad On the UX and the g501 and it can skip around once in a while when you’re tracking but the texture is nice and buttons are responsive. It’s not the best track pad but it is a gaming laptop so you’ll often have a mouse connected to it anyways.
Screen & Display
The screen is a 17.3 inch IPS non-touch panel with a resolution of 1920 x 1080. The viewing angles are okay too. It’s not a particularly bright panel but the color range is really good. Thankfully it’s a matte screen so you don’t have to deal with too many crazy reflections. It’s a solid screen for the price of the laptop but if you need a really good color accuracy for photo or video editing, I would highly recommend calibrating it. But if you just plan on using this laptop for games, you’re good to go right out of the box. The webcam up top is a 720p camera. The image quality isn’t particularly good and the colors feel a little washed out but it works at anyone.
Storage
The drive that this model comes with is a 7200 RPM 1TB hard drive and I was actually pleased with the performance. If you edit videos you don’t want to use this drive, you want to grab an external or use the empty socket but 1080p edits are smooth and 4k edits are pretty good too. You just need a 4k monitor to see the extra pixels but the drive that it comes with is not bad for just like regular use for gaming and just regular stuff.
Gaming Experience
So, speaking of which, games run well on the 960m games like CS-GO. You’re just going to rip through them. You’re rarely going to see a drop below a hundred frames per second with everything maxed out on 1080p. For slightly more demanding games like Heartstone or DOTA 2, if you put this on extreme graphics, everything’s turned up here laying will still be like 70 to 80 frames per second. But a full team fight can drop this to under 40 frames per second. So, if you’re competitive and you play the stuff for serious business, play on high graphics because even really messy team fights will still get Around 55, maybe 60 frames per second on team fights. Remember these numbers are for team fight Numbers. If you’re solo laning, it can be easily double these numbers but I don’t care about that numbers. I’m talking about where it matters for team fights. Fall out 4 plays nicely on this laptop. You can get around 50-60 frames per second on medium graphics but bumping it up too high drops us to 35-40 frames per second. So, the sweet spot is definitely on medium Setting for Fall Out. Rust is even more demanding. It’s actually one of the Most demanding games that I play and you have to drop your graphics setting to simple to get around 50-60 frames per second. It’s doable and the game still looks all right but you lose a lot of the detail.
Sounds & Thermal
The speakers are up on the keyboard area and they sound really good. The sound is clear and is directed right at you and it can get pretty loud. Obviously, it’s not as good as an external speaker but they’re nice and I’m not gonna lie. I thought the whole subwoofer thing on the bottom was a little gimmicky but it’s actually really cool. Like you can definitely hear and feel lower frequencies at least much more than the average notebook. The fan noise of the system is reasonably quiet. It’s about 25-26 Decibels at idle and most of that noise is coming from the mechanical drive and it’s around 35 decibels under load. Thermals are also respectable. It Doesn’t go much above a hundred degrees when it’s under load.
Battery
It’s a 120-watt charger and charging of the battery takes less than two hours. The battery life is really poor. So, this laptop has powerful components in there With the GTX 960 and there’s a big screen to light up but it only has a 48 Watt hour battery which is really small for a 17-inch laptop. The battery life on normal use is around two and a half hours and this is just like regular use. Using the web doing a little bit of work and playing games was under an hour.
Dislikes
Now most of the problem here lies in the fact that there’s a DVD drive. It’s cool to have an optical drive but it really eats of precious real estate inside the laptop. So, ASUS was kind of forced to put in a smaller battery and this is what you get.
Conclusion
Ok let’s do a recap! ASUS ROG GL752. Decent build quality with a mix of aluminum and plastic. The 1080p screen isn’t that bright and it needs calibration if you want to do any kind of color accurate work but it’s nice and big for games. The keyboard is comfortable to type on once you get used to the whole shift and Layout and the trackpad is ok. It wouldn’t be bad if it didn’t skip around but it skips around and on the inside. We have a speedy skylake i7 and the GTX 960m that handles most games really well and also for video editing projects. A DVD drive that takes up a lot of space. 16 GB of RAM that you can upgrade up to 32 GB and an upgradeable 1TB SATA hard drive and m2 slot that you can put a drive into. And lastly, a really small 48-watt hour battery that lasts about two to three hours of normal use. Ok. So, the GL752 was obviously meant for gaming and it does a pretty good job of running a 960m. You’re not getting crazy graphics but it’s pretty Solid. I don’t love the inclusion of that DVD drive so it’s something that I would Have left out if I was designing these things [2015 model]. I feel like a lot of people won’t be using this drive and it’s using up space Inside the laptop that could otherwise be used for batteries. The other thing I don’t like is how thick it is. It’s not like the thickest Laptop in the world but it’s pretty thick, but it can forgive this all because of its price. It’s priced a little bit over a thousand dollars and that gets you into a pretty solid system that has incredible upgrade potential. It’s got 2 drive spaces that you can upgrade. It’s got fully upgradeable RAM. It’s pretty solid, so if you’re looking for a 17-inch gaming laptop, this is a really good option and take a look at. And that’s it for my ASUS ROG GL752 review! Hope you guys liked it. Feel free also to check my “Best Gaming Laptop Under 1000 USD” post for comparison to other laptops. Also feel free to comment your ASUS ROG GL752 Review below!
