I spent weeks trying to find the perfect laptop with a real 4 core hyper threaded i7 and a GTX 970M before seeing this one pop up as “New” on Bestbuy just a few days ago. And since it was the cheapest one that also fell into the 15 inch laptop category I settled on giving it a shot and picked one up in store. The salesman told me stock is really limited as they did just start getting these in stores so if you’re interested definitely give a store a call as I find the whole if it’s in stock at a store thing hit or miss a lot. This laptop has a lot of positives for me so I’ll start with the negatives so it’s not all positives until right at the very end. First up is the keyboard. It’s just bland to type on to me with very little feedback. It’s really hard to explain on the internet you just have to go out and use different laptops. It’s the springs or something in the laptop that just makes it feel bland to me. Not a huge deal breaker and it is a personal preference so you may like it. 2nd is the hard drive. The specs say it’s a 5400rpm unit and boy does it feel it. Slow is an understatement especially if you’re like me and had an SSD powered laptop or desktop. This is something I’ll address later when I’m not traveling and either replace or add an SSD depending on the chassis. 3rdly is the 12gb of RAM. When windows eats up a good 4gb on average leaving you with 8gb it just worries me. I haven’t had issues with it yet but I do plan on upgrading that as well just food for thought. 4th is the battery. It’s a gaming laptop so of course it’s not going to last as long as say a Macbook or something BUT with that being said it’s not easily replaceable like in most laptops which is why I’m listing it as a negative. I’m sure it can be replaced if/when it goes bad but it doesn’t just pop out like most laptops and at least from the looks of it requires the bottom cover off, and then unscrew about 6 screws and unplug it from the mainboard. And of course lastly since some people can’t ready descriptions NO it DOES NOT have a CD Drive. Not a huge deal for me as almost all my games are downloaded. NOW onto the good stuff. Performance outside of loading (because slow hard drive) is fan freaking tastic. It’s a true quad core hyper threaded CPU and a 970M. It’s not like my SLI 980 Ti rig at home but it’s not supposed to be but high/very high settings at 1080p is fine for me on the road. As for the display itself well it works. I’m not a display-a-holic nor someone that needs accurate colors or what have you that you need different display tech for. It gets bright enough to almost hurt while looking at a blank white screen and it’s 60hz refresh idk what else some people want. Bloatware is still there but it’s not too crazy imho. Took me maybe all of 5 minutes to get rid of everything not ASUS related as I’ll get rid of them depending if they annoy me or not which so far hasn’t been the case. The keyboard even though it’s bland for me to type on it looks nice I like the back lightning on it. And it has a number pad a nice touch even though imho it made things a bit cramped but not a huge deal breaker for me either way. The chassis itself feels nice. The back of the display is this really slick aluminum but then sadly everything else is basically plastic but hey this thing doesn’t have a bitten apple on the back so I wasn’t expecting everything aluminum. As for its gaming chops well I have yet to find a game that I have to dial things down past high. The new Doom, The Division, Fallout 4 and Metal Gear V all play at high at full 1080p or even with a couple settings on Ultra. Can play 4K video from Youtube onto my 4K monitor just fine so there’s that but as for 4K gaming well yeah right not on a laptop. My big desktop with more power GPU’s can barely do that so that’s wishful thinking for another time. I replaced the stock 5400rpm SATA Drive with a Samsung 850 Evo and things are much better now. There’s still that m.2 slot that I’ll eventually use up but my local Frys had a deal on that 2.5 inch drive I couldn’t miss out. Swapping it was fairly easy just requiring basic tools and of course the knowhow how to transfer the data from the source drive over or if you’re feeling brave doing a fresh Windows install. All in all very impressed and happy with my purchase.

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