ASUS ROG G751JY + G-Sync review – the G-Sync is the finishing touch that’s been missing on this gaming beast

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ASUS G751JY is a well-known notebook for being a drastically cheaper alternative to the Alienware 17 yet offering almost the same hardware with some key features that we’d like to discuss and test in this short review. We are referring to this review as “short” because we already did a thorough review of the model with the usual tests and benchmarks.

Nevertheless, we are here again with the same machine, but this time the G751JY offers something that other notebooks don’t, or at least most of the competitors out there. The so-called special feature here is the G-Sync technology implemented inside the display developed by NVIDIA itself with the main purpose of enhancing the visual experience during games by delivering smooth animations and graphics. We thought it was worth to make another review since the G-Sync-enabled variants cost a little bit more due to the controller chip integrated. Continue reading to find out more about this exciting notebook and how it stands out in the crowd.

You can check the current price of the notebook here: http://amzn.to/1hz3Ugb

Contents


Retail package

The box includes a generous set of accessories that ASUS has kindly provided to every lucky user with the ROG G751JY. You will find the usual user manuals, DVD with drivers, AC charger and cable, and a big backpack specially made for carrying around the notebook. But this is not the best part. As a part of a promotion, ASUS is offering a free copy of one of the latest Assassin’s Creed title – Assassin’s Creed Black Flag.

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Design and construction

The design from our previous review hasn’t been changed a bit except for the G-Sync sticker on the inside. Nonetheless, we are going to walk you through again with the most notable details about the machine’s build quality and design.


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Following the usual design signature of ROG (Republic of Gamers) notebooks, the G751JY includes high-quality materials like soft touch plastic and brushed aluminum elements. The better part of the lid consists of the aforementioned soft touch coating and a big aluminum plate accommodating the LED ASUS ROG logo in the center. The interesting thing here is that the hinges aren’t placed at the back of the device, but instead the main exhaust vents take the usual place of the hinges. This leads to a design limitation and the notebook’s display can’t be opened any further, but will offer comfortable angles, nonetheless. At least the grills look really good thanks to the anodized aluminum and the design implemented here. Also, the lid doesn’t bend easily under heavy pressure mainly thanks to the reinforced aluminum in the center.

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As for the bottom part of the notebook – there are several silicon legs for keeping the notebook firmly in place and ASUS has “granted” an easy access to most of the internals that might need changing or upgrading in the future – 2.5″ HDD/SSD, M.2 PCIe x4 and two RAM slots. Keep in mind that there are only two RAM slots accessible while the other two are on the other side of the motherboard and can be reached with some more digging. This will require disassembling the notebook almost completely by removing the keyboard as well. Still, the battery isn’t user-replaceable.

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Moving to the sides we find 2x USB 3.0 ports, optical drive and SD card reader on the left while the right side accommodates the headphone jack, microphone jack, and the audio-in jack as well as USB 3.0 port with Charger+, another USB 3.0 port, HDMI, LAN, VGA, and DC charging port. Not only that, but ASUS has also included a high-speed Thunderbolt port, that can be used for data transfer or external display.


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Opening the lid will reveal the 17.3-inch display with matte finish, built-in microphone and webcam on top with fairly thin bezels around the screen. As for the rest of the interior – we kind of liked it but disliked several design details. For example, the soft-touch coating around the keyboard seems too fragile and will wear off in a few months and attracts nasty smudges and fingerprints. Although, the soft touch plastic really feels great.

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The keyboard is the feature we liked the most. By far one of the best keyboards we’ve used so far – great tactile feedback, long key travel evenly spaced buttons with big keys and the arrow keys are well-thought of in contrast to most gaming notebooks. Hitting a neighboring button is virtually impossible. There are also 3 macro keys at your disposal, unlike the Alienware 15 that fits 6 of them on the side. Right next to the macro keys is the dedicated Steam button for instantly launching steam and the camera button for launching a recording session – quite useful for streamers and vloggers. Keep in mind that the “start recording” button will require some time for you to adjust to, because we found ourselves hitting that key instead of tapping the “Esc” button. The only thing that didn’t come to our liking are the “Fn” keys for multimedia control. They are too far apart from the “Fn” key making them unreachable with one hand. It’s rather frustrating when you are watching a movie and want a quick and easy access to the main controls of the player. The touchpad, however, is flawless. Again we are presented with long key travel and excellent feedback of the mouse buttons and the touchpad area is responsive and precise.


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The overall design and feel of the notebook just screams “premium” at your face and assures sturdiness. However, the strong chassis and beautiful design with a good cooling system on the inside comes at a price – heavy weight and bulky body. The profile measures 53 mm at the thickest point and weighs 4.05 kg. Having said that, you don’t want to be carrying around this notebook on a daily basis. This remains as our only complaint about the build quality and design.

Display

We have already tested the ASUS ROG G751JY’s display and interestingly enough the panel used for the G-Sync variant is the same one found in the regular model – LG LP173WF4 SPD1 panel with 17.3-inch diagonal, matte finish and Full HD (1920×1080) resolution. Results are identical so you can look them up in the previous review.

G-Sync

As for the G-Sync chip – that’s a great addition to the specs sheet and it’s not marketing-driven either. This technology really does make a difference. We’ve played around with several first-person shooters, as this is the most precise gaming genre and the so-called stuttering and input lag can be felt during gameplay the most. GTA V also ran smoother than we are used to on a mobile graphics chip. We compared the gaming experience between GTA V with maximum settings and G-Sync turned off and maximum settings with G-Sync turned on. The GPU was able to run the game at around 30-45 fps, which is more than acceptable, and the frequent frame drops on some scenes and areas of the map didn’t allow any stuttering or screen tearing with G-Sync turned on. Animations and gameplay were buttery-smooth while with G-Sync turned off some scenes appeared a bit lag-ish. It’s a neat feature if you considering to run heavy games with settings set to maximum.

More about the G-Sync technology can be found in our thorough article on the matter here:
http://laptopmedia.com/news/what-is-nvidias-g-sync-and-does-it-really-make-a-difference/

Pulse-width modulation (PWM, Screen flickering)

Another feature added to the screen is the absence of PWM across all brightness levels. The initial claims from ASUS point out that since the display is G-Sync-enabled, it doesn’t use PWM to regulate screen brightness and the results from our tests are here to back this assertion up. You can see on the graph below that no aggressive light pulsation is detected throughout all brightness levels.

PWM-ASUS G751JY

Specs sheet

The tech specs listed below may differ depending on your region.


CPUIntel Core i7-4720HQ (4 cores, 2.60 – 3.60 GHz, 6MB cache)
RAM8GB (1x 8192MB) – DDR3, 1600MHz
GPUNVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M (4GB GDDR5)
HDD/SSD1TB HDD (7200 rpm)
Display17.3-inch (43.94 cm) – 1920×1080 (FullHD), IPS matte + G-Sync
Optical driveBlu-ray burner
ConnectivityLAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0
FeaturesMemory card reader (SD/MMC), backlit keyboard, Kensington lock, 4xUSB 3.0 ports, HD webcam, HDMI, VGA, Mini DisplayPort, stereo speakers + subwoofer, backpack, G-Sync
Battery6000 mAh (8-cell)
Thickness (at thickest point without the “legs”)53.00 mm (2.09 inches)
Weight (with the battery)4053 g (8.94 lbs)
Weight of the charger963 g (2.12 lbs)


ASUS ROG G751 configurations


Battery

For a typical gaming notebook, we cannot expect great results, but ASUS did include a rather big battery (8-cell, 6000 mAh) which is normal considering the big chassis and the power-hungry hardware – CPU with 47W TDP, the most powerful mobile GPU on the market and 17.3-inch IPS Full HD screen draining the battery like hell. Results didn’t differ from the once we published in the first review, but here they are. Also, all tests were performed with the usual settings – Wi-Fi turned on, 120 cd/m2 screen brightness and power saver mode turned on.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

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More than acceptable result for a 17.3-inch gaming notebook with IPS panel and power-hungry internals – 252 minutes (4 hours and 12 minutes).

Watching a movie

We tested the notebook for video playback with 720p HD movie.

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Somewhat lower result here, yet better than most mainly because of the large battery used – 195 minutes (3 hours and 15 minutes).

3D gaming

To measure the 3D gameplay endurance, we are using Metro: Last Light at minimal graphic settings.

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It’s highly unlikely that you will leave your notebook away from the charger during gaming sessions, but still very good result for a gaming notebook – 109 minutes (1 hour and 49 minutes).

CPU

Intel_Core_i7_logoAlthough Intel Core i7-4720HQ debuts in Q1 of 2015, this high-end processor is part of the Haswell family, since the Broadwell generation represents only energy-efficient “U” series chips. The Core i7-4720HQ is a direct successor of the i7-4710HQ which is commonly used in gaming laptops due to its higher clock speeds and high power consumption for more raw performance boost. As usual, the Core i7-4720HQ uses the so-called HyperThreading technology, allowing the CPU to emulate one virtual core for each physical one, thus running 8 threads at the same time with only 4 physical cores. The CPU has a base frequency of 2.6GHz and Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz for 4 active cores, 3.5GHz for two active cores and 3.6GHz for one active core. This makes the Core i7-4720HQ faster than the Core i7-4710HQ with only 100MHz.

The CPU is designed with 22nm manufacturing process (since it’s part of the Haswell generation). The cache levels are high and are as follows: 256KB at level 1, 1024KB at level 2, 6144KB at level 3. The maximum operating temperature is 100°C and as for the maximum TDP – 47W and that includes the memory controller, VRMs, and integrated graphics. Speaking of which, the Core i7-4720HQ accommodates Intel HD Graphics 4600 with 20 EU (Execution Units) clocked at 400MHz and can go up to 1200MHz. The maximum supported memory of the chip is 32GB DDR3L 1333/1600 with two memory channels. Other notable features are HyperThreading, AVX, AVX2, Quick Sync, Virtualization, AES-NI.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i7-4720hq/

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i7-4720HQ managed to get 12.556 million moves per second. For comparison, one of the most powerful PCs, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M is a high-end graphics chip, announced on October 7, 2014. It will be available in models with up to 8GB of GDDR5 memory. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M uses the Maxwell GM204 architecture and has 1536 CUDA cores. All of them operate at 1038MHz, but NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0 can dynamically increase that frequency.

The graphics card has a 256bit bus and supports DirectX 11.2, Pixel Shader 5.0, Optimus, SLI, PhysX, OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL 4.4, DirectCompute, CUDA, Blu-Ray 3D and 3D Vision. Memory bandwidth is 160GB/sec. Max resolutions (WxH) are 3840×2160 digital and 2048×1536 analog.

 

Gaming tests

All gaming tests were performed with the latest drivers from NVIDIA installed and in this case – 355.82 WHQL.

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Metro: LL (1080p, Low)Metro: LL (1080p, Medium)Metro: LL (1080p, Max)
72 fps47 fps37 fps

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F1 2014 (1080p, Low)F1 2014 (1080p, Medium)F1 2014 (1080p, Max)
119 fps115 fps106 fps

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Thief (1080p, Low)Thief (1080p, Medium)Thief (1080p, Max)
68 fps66 fps59 fps

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GTA 5 (1080p, Low)GTA 5 (1080p, Medium)GTA 5 (1080p, Max)
125 fps59 fps32 fps

Temperatures

This section is really important especially for gaming notebooks as a lot of users report excessive heating during long hours of work or gameplay which is kind of understandable given the powerful hardware housed inside the chassis. For this section, we used a two-staged test that includes 100% CPU and 100% GPU load do see whether the system can handle high temperatures and bigger loads for long periods of time. This, however, is a highly unlikely scenario and it’s virtually impossible to reproduce during normal exploitation.

We start off with one hour of 100% CPU load. As you can see from the image below, the CPU temperature at normal state doesn’t go beyond 40 °C, but under heavy load can reach as high as 82 °C, which is still far from the maximum operating temperature of 100 °C. The CPU boost frequency didn’t go for too long, but it went down to 3.3 GHz and stayed that way throughout the whole hour. Consider the fact that the CPU can run at a maximum of 3.4 GHz with 4 active cores so this can be considered as an excellent result. No throttling, whatsoever. On the graph below, the green line represents the load and the red line stands for the CPU temperature.

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After an hour, we ran the GPU stress test as well and things got really interesting. The CPU temperature rose to up to 96 °C indicating that both chips (CPU and GPU) share some heat, but still in acceptable ranges. The GPU’s frequency didn’t dip for a second and remained at 78 °C. However, the same cannot be said about the CPU, because the system was constantly trying to adjust the right frequency in order to keep the temperatures low resulting in throttling. The frequency of the processor was constantly jumping from around 700 MHz to 3.4 GHz, but this is preferable compared to the GPU throttling, on the contrary, because the GPU is more important for a gaming notebook than the CPU. Graphic-related tasks are way more intense and consuming.

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We’ve also measured the surface of the chassis to see if the high inner temperatures affect the user experience. And as you can see from the heat map below, the area where palms rest remained cool and the only slightly hotter area was near the exhaust vents. Still, we consider the notebook well-designed for excessive heat and manages high temperatures well without affecting the user’s experience. Also, we would like to note that this machine’s fan was oddly quiet even under heavy load. We consider that as a great plus.

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Verdict

The notebook features high-quality materials like soft touch plastic and brushed aluminum for the build without any cracks, holes or irregularities around the chassis. The only thing left to be perfected, however, is the size and weight of the machine. This is the price you have to pay for a sturdy notebook that handles high temperatures well. The additional airflow inside the big body really does make a difference. Also, the interior features the very same soft touch coated plastic with excellent keyboard offering macro buttons and perfect alignment paired with long key travel. The same can be said about the touchpad leaving us with nothing more to be desired.

As for the hardware, the quad-core Intel Core i7-4720HQ CPU and the most powerful NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M (4GB GDDR5) mobile GPU on the market really do make a great team for a reasonable price. Its Alienware counterpart offers mostly the same hardware for more than €500 above G751’s price. ASUS went even further with the features they offer – Thunderbolt port, built-in subwoofer for richer sound and G-Sync chip inside the display. These useful features are nowhere to be found in the Alienware 17 and surprisingly Dell’s offering holds a slightly less powerful Core i7-4710HQ CPU. Although, the performance difference won’t make a big impact or any impact of that matter.

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Finally, we would like to address the key feature of this machine – the G-Sync-enabled display. The LG LP173WF4 SPD1 matches the one found in the normal version, but this time includes the G-Sync chip inside allowing a more smooth and pleasant viewing experience during gameplay. To be honest, the G-Sync chip really does make a lot of difference in more demanding games with settings set to maximum or close to a maximum. However, we will need more units like this one to fully understand and test the capabilities of the new technology and then we can make a more thorough and comprehensive assessment.

You can check the current price of the notebook here: http://amzn.to/1hz3Ugb

Pros

  • Flawless design and build quality
  • Excellent keyboard and touchpad performance
  • Thunderbolt port
  • G-Sync display
  • Quality IPS panel
  • Good cooling system that keeps the chassis cool despite the high inner temperatures
  • Good battery life for a gaming notebook
  • The fans stay silent even under heavy load
  • Great upgrade options like two 2.5-inch HDD/SSD slots (one occupied by the stock drive) and one M.2 PCIe x4 SSD


Cons

  • CPU throttling at high CPU and GPU load
  • Heavy (4.3 kg) and bulky chassis (53 mm thick)
  • The soft-touch plastic is too fragile and attracts fingerprints and smudges

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JTL (@jtl999)
8 years ago

Where is the PWM test?

Valued
Valued
8 years ago

Waiting for pwm report on this one.

Valued
Valued
8 years ago
Reply to  Rossen Pandev

So g-sync just means no pwm ?? In short i mean.

Axolotl
8 years ago

Hi Rossen, may I ask how you measure PWM? I’ve spent 8 years trying to find a laptop that doesn’t give me headaches, unsuccessfully. I have an oscilloscope, but no adequate sensors to measure PWM. Contact me via email if you prefer. Thanks.