Impressions and Conclusions
If there is a word I can describe the Asus G51J is that it’s very tight and capable from nearly all aspects of design and performance.Blow Away Your Competition and Your Expectations
The combination of the Intel Core i7-720QM (or 820QM if configured that way) and the NVIDIA GTX 260M is plenty fast for playing games at high details on the native screen. That alone should be enough to make gamers satisfied, but Asus exceeds your expectations away by putting heaps icing on the cake:
- Gorgeous LED 1920×1080 screen that looks fantastic playing movies, games, and viewing photos.
- Ability to mount 2 hard drives (but no RAID)- put an SSD in there to boot from and you have a killer mobile system!
- Full backlit keyboard
- A free Razer Copperhead mouse and backpack to carry everything around
- All around solid and thoughtful design
As nice as the G51J is, it is not without its faults. My biggest gripe is the location of the exhaust vent – it blows HOT 60C/ 140F air out the side and even when idle the air is noticeably warm. This makes the G51J essentially unusable by left-handed mousers.
Even if you’re not a Leftie, you’ll find that you’ll be doing things to accommodate this poor design by moving your papers out of the way, relocating your cold drink, or positioning the system so it doesn’t blow air onto the person next to you. It may seem trivial, but it does impact how you work and use the G51J and Asus didn’t have to make it this way.
Clean Up the Installation
My next gripe is the amount of bloatware installed on the G51J – it just spoils what is otherwise a very tight product. While there are some pieces of software worth keeping, majority of the additional software preloaded on the G51J is worthless in my opinion, and some of it is just plain juvenile.
Thankfully you can do away with the preinstalled software by using the Restore Disc which installs a clean OS with most drivers. Unfortunately most users won’t know this… well you do now, because you’re a smart PCPerspective reader. 😉
Room for Improvement
The battery life and the audio for the G51J is typically mediocre for a notebook system. The short battery life is excusable since this is a gaming system and the more powerful components will drain the reserves faster. However the audio could have been better – it’s sad that such a beautiful LCD panel is coupled with poor speakers.
In the end…
These gripes can be overlooked by the simple fact that the G51J delivers where it matters, and excels in areas you didn’t expect which makes it a joy to own. For a ball-park price of $1400-1500 USD, it’s on the lower end of the spectrum for gaming notebooks but don’t interpret this as being cheaply made.
The Asus G51J is well designed, performs extremely well, and attractively priced – in my opinion this makes the G51J possibly the best value in mobile PC gaming. It is for these reasons the Asus G51J is being recognized with a Gold Award (unless you mouse on the left, in which case you better look elsewhere. Sorry!).
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The Asus G50VT, which is the
The Asus G50VT, which is the predecessor to the G51J is superior in my opinion. It has a sexy red trim and that small OLED screen behind the keyboard. It can actually have more single core x86 performance than the G51J thanks to the X9100 Extreme processor, which you can overclock to 3.45, maybe 3.6GHZ 100% stable at full load.
The Forcecon fan is easily replaceable with a few screws, versus the G51J where I’ve heard you have to replace the whole heatsink to replace the fan.