Out of Pod Experience

Dear Community,

As I go through the forums, I am meeting new pilots and people whom help me with my ideas in giving feedback and helping to make sure the content provided is sufficient enough. Anyway, today I would like to give you something different, something with some power and a suggestion about gaming computers.

Today I want to talk about my graduation gift: The ASUS ROG GL551JW - DS74

This laptop features:


1. Intel Core i7-4720HQ CPU @ 2.6GHz

2. 16GB RAM

3. 128GB Solid State Drive (Really, 104GB though)

4. 1TB HDD (Partitioned into 2 465GB drives E: & F:)

5. 64-Bit Operating System

6. Non-Touchscreen

7. Pre-Installed Windows 8.1

8. NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 960m


As you can see from above, this laptop is chalk full of goodies.

This laptop also comes with a gaming mouse, which is right handed, go figure that I'm left handed.

So, why a laptop?

I needed a new laptop since my old 2011 (Early) Macintosh computer kept shitting the bed every year, I figured that it was just about time to start with a new laptop, and what better way than through a graduation gift.

I needed something portable, and this was the series I looked at because of the following, price, name brand, and inclusion.

ASUS is a trusted brand by my family, everyone in the family with the exception of my mother (Does not know much about computers, yet was an IT person back in the day). With us trusting their reliability, it was an obvious choice to look into their products.

Now, here is my verdict on the laptop thus far (Only having it for 2 days)

Design of this laptop is unbelievable, I could not have picked a better looking laptop for the price. The computer body is made of a steel body with brush aluminum to give it that hard feel. However, the draw back to having this type of body is that your fingerprints, and smudges will happen regardless of how careful you are, and or how clean your fingers are. I would highly recommend getting a full keyboard ad palm cover to keep your computer keyboard clear of future dust and clogs.

The back-lit LED keyboard comes in 4 brightness settings, 1 being off and 4 being the brightest. The WASD keys light up brights with their darker colored red to let you know were the keys are. This keyboard is simple yet effective.

The SSD helps to boost/restart this computer in just 7 seconds with the ability to jump into the internet, steam games instantly without it slowing down.

While still talking about storage, I would like to note that everything that is saved originally (Before you start installing stuff) is saved on the SSD. Also, when you do go to install stuff, your default saved storage will be the C: Drive (SSD).

This computer can benchmark games at Ultra/Highest settings @ roughly 40-60 FPS, some games include, Battlefield 4, Arma II, EVE-Online, and others. The benchmarks are taken from in-game and also from Youtube videos testing the games capabilities.

Overall this computer has the ability to heavily multitask, being able to run top notch games without a hitch, and being able to store a lot of your favorite games/pictures/music on 1TB of space along with 128GB of SSD storage.

Now, here is the price that may get some of you to think, that is expensive, and others to think that is a great deal.

My purchase came through Amazon, giving a $60 discount over ASUS's webstore.

I also bought a $120 2 Year Service Warranty Plan

Base price @ Amazon $1,238

Base price @ ASUS $1,299

The total price after tax was around $1,400 (Including the 2 year service warranty contract

My Verdict: 9.5/10

EVE:Probe?

The results are in:

Scene Status Malloc FPS
fleet1 complete 65MB 4233.0
fleet2 complete 229MB 2893.0
fleet3 complete 113MB 2229.0
asteroid_rocks complete 51MB 7246.0
indirect_lighting_small complete N/A N/A
buildEffect complete 63MB 5503.0
video_screen complete N/A N/A
controltower complete 223MB 2319.0
festivallaunchers complete 101MB 7463.0

*All results were copied and pasted from the entire results section, nothing was altered.

MSI GT Series GT72 Dominator Pro-211 Gaming Laptop Intel Core i7 4710HQ (2.50GHz) 16GB Memory 1TB HDD 128GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 8GB 17.3" Windows 8.1 64-Bit

I went with the 980M to make it as future proof as possible and because of the 980's lower heat output. Normally, I prefer desktops for upgradeability purposes, but with almost every game being designed to run on both consoles and PCs, I figured this laptop should last awhile due to the lower tech specs of consoles. Plus, it serves as a desktop replacement since the apps/programming tools I use seem to have plateaued in terms of hardware requirements.

However, the price dictates that it's a "special occasion laptop" as opposed to something I would buy casually (i.e. something my wife would normally veto with prejudice.)


Scene Status Malloc FPS
fleet1 complete 65MB 10462.0
fleet2 complete 229MB 7162.0
fleet3 complete 114MB 5256.0
asteroid_rocks complete 51MB 17001.0
indirect_lighting_small complete N/A N/A
buildEffect complete 63MB 14085.0
video_screen complete N/A N/A
controltower complete 223MB 2634.0
festivallaunchers complete 101MB 11907.0

My laptop use to reboot in 4 seconds (full reboot), but I had linux on it I recently put win7 back on it (used to be on the burnt up mechanical drive), it's doing 7 sec reboot, full down and back to full load. I think your only bad point on the laptop is having that 1TB in there... those are physical drives and not a single hybrid SSD/HDD, right? Better than simply the HUGE speed boost with all things SSD related, the power pull and heat radiation is significantly lessened. W/O the HDD, battery life and system life is improved. I'd pull the HDD and toss it onto the heap before it turns you laptop into one. If it is hybrid, I'd suggest hitting the ejection button and replacing it with a pure SSD right away.