ASUS G73SW + SNB: Third Time’s the Charm?

G73 Is Still Kicking…

One year later, the G73 is still kicking, but I have to say that I’m ready for something new. Familiarity may not be breeding contempt yet, but that love at first sight feeling is definitely fading. If you purchased the original G73JH, there’s no real reason to upgrade to the G73SW for games. For CPU-intensive applications, Sandy Bridge is still an awesome upgrade from Clarksfield, but I’ve seen other SNB designs that impress me more in some areas. The G73 still has plenty of good aspects, but let’s see some innovation and improved industrial design—as Vivek puts it, every engineer should be required to use a MacBook Pro for a couple months, just so they can get a feel for all the design elements that it gets right.

Obviously, the G73SW isn’t anything like a MacBook Pro, not even the 17” model. The GPU alone is far more powerful than anything Apple has ever shipped in a notebook, and with that power comes a penalty in chassis size. You’re not going to cool a GTX 460M very well in an ultrathin chassis, and you’re really not going to have a quiet-running notebook at heavy loads with such a design. However, that doesn’t mean you have to use a predominantly plastic chassis. On the other hand, you don’t have to go full out with a unibody aluminum chassis either.

I still appreciate plenty of areas of the G73 design, like the keyboard backlighting and the lack of glossy surfaces (outside of the LCD), the good cooling, and the reasonable noise levels. Performance has always been a strong point, pricing is acceptable, and you get a nice selection of extras (a backpack and laser mouse, if you purchase the A1 model we’re reviewing). Still, this is a huge system even by 17.3”-notebook standards, and there are faster options out there where you’ll get more than 30% better performance for a 30% price increase. Until we start seeing truly upgradeable mobile GPUs, notebook gamers are best off spending as much as they can up front; gaming requirements continue to increase every year, and there's still a gulf between the top mobile GPUs and their desktop counterparts.

Looking at the desktop world, we now have $230 GPUs like the GTX 560 Ti that have twice the number of CUDA cores as the 460M, and they’re clocked 21% higher as well. To go along with the potential 142% computational performance increase, you also get 113% more GPU memory bandwidth. Yeah, all of that in a $230 desktop GPU. Shift over to the mobile world, and the cheapest GTX 460M notebook will set you back around $1325. That laptop comes from ASUS as well, the ASUS G53SW. Hopefully we can get one of those in for review next, because on paper that’s a more compelling option (even if you don’t get the mouse and backpack). But the point is, with mainstream desktop GPUs pushing that sort of performance, you can count on more complex games coming out to make use of them. Just like Mafia II and Metro 2033 (and some other titles as well) manage to choke anything less than a 460M at moderately high resolutions, 2012 is going to bring [along with the end of the world] titles that will bring even the GTX 460M to its knees.

Ultimately, with any review we have to ask: is the product worth buying? In the case of the ASUS G73SW, we can certainly answer in the affirmative. Anyone looking for a gaming notebook they can take to LAN parties should be very happy with this purchase, and even if the GTX 460M isn’t the fastest chip on the block, you can look at our Mobile Bench results to see how it still blows away mainstream mobile GPUs like the 425M. (We didn’t show the results here, but we’ve got our Medium 768p gaming scores in Bench.)

I really, really want to check out the G53SW model next, ASUS, because personally 17.3” gaming notebooks are just a bit too bulky for my taste. If you have similar tastes, check back next week for our review of a 15.6” notebook sporting AMD’s latest HD 6970M GPU. It may cost more than the G73SW and G53SW, but it’s also got the performance to back it up! Hopefully the next revision of ASUS’ G5/G7 series can get something similar.