The G759JZ makes a good impression right from the start. The 17-inch machine may be big and bulky, weighing in at a hefty 4.5 kg and measuring a mighty 58 mm thick. But the build quality is excellent. The matt-black chassis has an attractive ‘soft-touch’ finish, while the keyboard has a nice, firm feel to it. It’s based around a quad-core Haswell-gen Intel Core i7 running at 2.4 GHz, backed up by a top-of-the-range nVidia GeForce GTX 880M with 4 GB video memory. There’s a healthy 16 GB of system memory, and the G750JZ boots from a 256 GB solid-state drive, with a conventional 1 TB hard drive included to store your games, music and videos. There’s also a Blu-ray drive for high-def films, a 2.1 speaker system, and even an Intel/Apple Thunderbolt interface for high-speed back-up drives. (See all laptops buying advice.)
Asus RoG G750JZ: performance and benchmarks
Mind you, the solid-state drive wasn’t quite as speedy as we might have hoped, letting the laptop fall almost 100 points short of the 6000-point level that we’d anticipated for our general-purpose PCMark 7 tests. The Home and Work suites in PCMark 8 produced more solid scores, at 3200 and 3380 points respectively, and there’s no doubt that the G750JZ can handle pretty much anything you throw at it. There was no problem with gaming performance, either. Stalker: Call Of Pripyat was quickly dismissed with an average framerate of 135 fps, even at its maximum resolution and with Ultra graphics settings. Tomb Raider produced a consistent 60 fps on both its Normal and High settings at 1920 x 1080 resolution, and still maintained a strong 47.7 fps even when we stepped up to the game’s Ultimate setting. Performance when running Batman: Arkham City was just as strong, comfortably managing 55 fps on the game’s default setting at 1600 x 900, and only dropping slightly to 46 fps when we stepped right up to Maximum settings at 1920 x 1080 resolution. Scores like that put the G750JZ among the most powerful gaming laptops we’ve seen so far. It even managed something close to respectable battery life, lasting for 4 hours and 30 mins of streaming video when using integrated graphics. We do have a couple of small complaints, though. The 17.3-inch screen has 1920 x 1080 resolution, and the image quality is enhanced by its anti-glare matt finish. But while the horizontal viewing angles are very good, the vertical viewing scope is more limited, and we did find ourselves needing to nudge the screen to improve visibility. And, despite its decent volume, the stereo speaker system sounded annoyingly tinny at times. Those aren’t fatal flaws by any means, but they do stand out on an otherwise impressive piece of gaming kit. (See also: the 15 best laptops: the best laptops you can buy in 2014.)
