First off let me state that I absolutely love my Asus G74sx laptop and as it turned out I love my new Asus G46 laptop too. I bought this laptop because I wanted one that would easily fit on a tv dinner type of tray that I keep next to the sofa in our living room so that I'd have a laptop that I could just keep by the sofa that has both performance as well as a smaller footprint than the G74 laptop by Asus. Gaming: It plays all of the games that I have thrown at it (and I've got over 225 games on the Steam service) which is maybe 25 to 35 games so far and all of them play absolutely great on this. Web surfing: For web surfing, games and business applications this is one solid laptop. It accels at all of them due to it's use of the "optimus" system which means that it has both an Intel HD 4000 as well as an Nvidia GTX 660m video chips inside of it. When doing things like web surfing or business applications it uses the Intel 4000 chip to reduce the amount of electricity it uses while on the battery to extend the amount of time it can be used when on battery power. However, when you switch to a full 3D game it switches automatically (or should) to the Nvidia 660m high performance video chip to give you the performance you would demand in a gaming laptop when playing video games. It doesn't always work, sometimes you have to manually set the game to use the Nvidia chip instead of the Intel chip. Optimus System (aka dual video chips built right in) But you'll know if it's not using the Nvidia GPU in your games as the Intel HD 4000 is an incapable gaming GPU. Where games that I play using the Nvidia GPU will get me about 50 fps, if the laptop tries to play those same games using the Intel HD 4000 chip, you might be lucky to get between 6 and 18 FPS, so you'll definitely know if you need to set it manually. In any event this optimus system does indeed save you power to extend how long you can use the laptop on the battery. Sound: The speakers in this laptop sound tremendously better than it's big brother the Asus G74 laptop and are more than acceptable for laptop speakers. Yeah you won't get a low bass thumping sound out of them, but it won't be a shrill high pitched twiney type of sound either. It's about right in the middle ground for laptop speakers, I'd actually rather listen through the built in speakers rather than put on a heavy set of TDK headsets. Graphics: More than acceptable for a laptop. Don't buy it expecting to get super high desktop type of performance in your games, that simply won't happen, but if you want or need to game on a laptop than for the price (when on sale) this is a great laptop to buy, IMHO. Keyboard: The keyboard does light up which makes using it at night great. However... It does NOT light up until you have logged into Windows 8, which means if you're trying to enter your password in a dark room at night, it makes it a bit of a pain in the butt to do so and could have been alleviated by simply making the keyboard light up as soon as it gets power instead of waiting until you've logged into Windows 8. Display: The display is beautiful, the colors feel spot on, and there's plenty of room in the adjustments to make it brighter or less bright. Non gloss screen makes it so that I don't have terrible room light reflecting off the screen back into my eyes. Portability I love that it's only around 5.5lbs and a gaming laptop, my Asus G74 is also a gaming laptop but more of a desktop alternative laptop as it is a 17.3" screen and weighs something close to 8 to 9.9lbs so this G46 feels very light at only 5.5lbs. And it fits in standard backpack style laptop bags. Cool factor: It's got a very cool Asus ROG (republic of gamers) logo on the lid and it lights up. I didn't notice it myself until somebody at the local coffee house commented on how it looked really cool with the logo all lit up and I have to agree, it does. Desktop vs Laptop: Don't buy this expecting to get full desktop computer performance in the games that you play, you won't get that. But what you will get is acceptable performance in many games for a laptop computer. Where I might get 60, 80 or 100+ FPS in a game on my desktop computer, in this laptop I might only get between 25 and 50 FPS which to my eyes is acceptable performance. For a laptop that is under $1000 the performance in the games that I play is more than acceptable. The Nvidia GTX 660m GPU with 2 GB DDR5 dedicated VRAM is awesome for a laptop and IMO works awesome with the screen resolution of 1366x768 (this laptops native resolution). I have also plugged in my big ol' 24" monitor at 1920 x 1200 and while the FPS do drop a bit, they are still in what I consider my acceptable performance range for FPS. Overall, I love this laptop, I felt the price is a bit on the high side (but that's a best buy issue, not really an Asus issue) but for what I got, I love this laptop and would definitely buy it again if I had to. I'm only sorry that they couldn't give us 2 hard drives so that I could put in a primary SSD drive as well as a traditional large HDD for data storage. That is really the only major con to this laptop but not one that would prevent me from buying it again if this laptop got into an accident of some sort and I needed to get a replacement. It's a really nice alternative for gaming if you for some reason need or want to game on a laptop. If you're only a business user (i.e. documents, web surfing, email etc) then it's way overkill for that, if you are a combo like I am, business use as well as gaming then it's just great for a sub $1000 laptop.

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