ASUS G73Jw: Out with the Old, In with the New
by Jarred Walton on November 3, 2010 12:33 AM ESTASUS G73Jw: Still a Good Notebook after Six Months
So let’s make it clear: when we first reviewed the G73Jh, we were very impressed with the features and performance, not to mention its great price for a high-end gaming notebook. Six months on and it still packs a punch—and the G73Jw revision doesn’t substantially alter the formula. If you disliked the stealth aesthetic, nothing has changed on that front. If you wanted a better price (without dropping to lesser components), things remain the same or perhaps even a bit more expensive, but the price—on both models—is still attractive, and either one would make for a fine gaming notebook. If you'd like some customization options and are willing to pay the price premium, you might also be interested in checking out XoticPC or AVADirect where you can customize the G73; unfortunately, while you keep the ASUS warranty, you don't get credit for the original parts—i.e. the i7-840QM is a $575 to $610 upgrade.
In short, our Gold Editors’ Choice gaming notebook is still tough to beat, but now you get to choose between identical twins with a few minor differences in personality. What the G73Jw offers is USB 3.0 support, roughly equal graphics performance, and CUDA/PhysX as a bonus. PhysX tends to put enough of a strain on performance that you’ll have to choose higher quality settings and anti-aliasing or go with PhysX. CUDA on the other hand is a technology that continues to see growing support, with major applications like Premiere CS5 now featuring CUDA optimizations. If you’re interested in Badaboom, Premiere, vReveal, or some of the other CUDA applications, the G73Jw is a worthwhile update to the G73 line. If all you really want is maximum gaming performance, we’d give a slight edge to the Mobility HD 5870.
Battery life is also an improvement, thanks to better idle power requirements from the GTX 460M. You’re still only getting 2-3 hours of typical use, but that’s better than nothing. We’re not sure if anything has improved on HD 5870 equipped notebooks since our last look, but NVIDIA does have a lead there. Conversely, raw performance on battery power is still in favor of the 5870 in the G73Jh, which runs closer to its AC performance than the G73Jw—at the cost of getting even less battery life. Somehow, we can’t really see the ability to run games faster for 30 minutes as being a major bullet point.
So that’s essentially it: you get the same design, USB 3.0, an updated CPU, and a new GPU. We don’t think the improved battery life is really a major deal for anyone shopping for a gaming laptop. Perhaps that will change when we get Sandy Bridge, since we’ll finally have the option for a quad-core Intel CPU and switchable graphics, but until then Clarksfield means that even a large 98Wh battery is likely going to fall below three hours of useful battery life. The G73Jw is a good laptop and certainly a viable alternative to the G73Jh, but if NVIDIA was looking for a knockout blow from ASUS this isn’t it. They've got a heavyweight contender in the ring, and both sides are landing blows, but this one is going to end up a split decision.
Finally, with the results from the GTX 460M we need to look at the mobile GPU market again. "High-end" notebook GPU performance remains highly compressed, with a spread of about 25% separating the top GTX 480M from lesser offerings like the HD 5850 and GTX 460M. In addition, the cost of upgrading to a faster GPU(s) can be prohibitive, and what we want more than anything is faster mobile GPUs that won't break the bank. What we really want right now is something like a mobile variant of the new Radeon 6800 parts, only this time with a full set of Stream Processors (unlike the 5870 where AMD used the 5770 desktop core for the mobile part).
The desktop 6870 is able to provide 93% of the desktop 5870 with fewer processor cores and it does it while using 12% less power. Or if you want another comparison point, the 6850 is 25 to 50 percent faster than the 5770 with 9% more computational power (cores * clock), it has slightly lower idle power draw, and load power draw is only 13W higher at most. If NVIDIA can put a 100W TDP 480M into notebooks, surely AMD can put in a true mobile 6870. Unfortunately, parts like that are probably still several months out—or more—and if the past is any indication, the mobile 6800 chips will come with dramatically reduced clocks and core counts (or get called the "Mobility 6900"), so what we get is plenty of choice but no killer product. Sandy Bridge and Optimus (or an AMD equivalent) with at least the performance of 460M is what I’m looking forward to seeing as the next generation of mobile gaming, and if we can get better than 480M performance with a TDP of 70W or less so much the better; hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to get exactly that.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
53 Comments
View All Comments
mhorn - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
Great article. Are there any plans to do a review of the G53JW that just came out since it's a smaller version of the G73JW but what looks to be a big upgrade over the G51JX?Kaihekoa - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
What's with all the laptop articles? There's one every few days which lately is much more often than desktop hardware. There are a dozen different components to a desktop with dozens of suppliers - how about some reviews on cases, power supplies, coolers, displays, etc. I barely visit Anandtech anymore because i seems like the only time I see a hardware review is for a major release from AMD/Intel/Nvidia/ATI.trengoloid - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
the g73jw Price 1,745.03 compare to g73jw-xa1 for the price of $1,449.00 it's $300 cheaper than the g73jw and the only difference between the two is the blueray disk and 250gig and 1 year warranty and bag and mouse but remember you can upgrade theg73jw-xa1 for a better spec than the g73jw like buy a bag and mouse for just $50 and buy a hdd 1.5 gig for just &78 and external blueray drive for $90so you get the external blue ray and the built in super dvd drive. there's a lot of upgrade you can do for the price of $300 :)
Wolfpup - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
It's 1120 cores, and the performance does suffer from it. If they do a mobile part, I'd expect it to be chopped down too-probably less than 800 cores. Either way I wouldn't expect it to be better than today's AMD part.JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
Oops... corrected. I got the 5770 core count mixed up with the 6870 and somehow thought they were both 800. I've edited the final paragraph to correct the information, but ultimately the percentages are still what matters. The Northern Islands GPUs improve shader core efficiency at the same power envelope, so one NI core is worth more than one Evergreen core. Anyway, the point is that I'm not really satisfied with mobile GPU performance, at least not at the top-end.We're at less than half of what the top desktop parts can do for both AMD and NVIDIA, and I want something more than that. 5870 has 1600 cores at 850MHz and 153.6GB/s of bandwidth while Mobile 5870 has 800 cores at 700MHz with 64GB/s of bandwidth. 480 has 480 cores at 1401MHz (700MHz for the non-shader stuff) with 177.4GB/s, but 480M has 352 cores at 850MHz (425MHz non-shader) and only 76.8GB/s. That means the best single AMD mobile GPU has roughly 41% of the computational power and bandwidth; the best single NVIDIA mobile GPU has 43-45% of the computational power and bandwidth.
Yes, they also use under half the power, but Intel manages to make a mobile CPU that has about 65% of the performance of its desktop counterpart and uses less than half the power. That's the bar I want to see mobile GPUs reach: two-thirds the performance, less than half the power. Binning already gets a lot of that, so a few tweaks and refinements ought to get the rest. :-)
trengoloid - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
the g73jw Price 1,745.03 compare to g73jw-xa1 for the price of $1,449.00 it's $300 cheaper than the g73jw and the only difference between the two is the blueray disk and 250gig and 1 year warranty and bag and mouse but remember you can upgrade theg73jw-xa1 for a better spec than the g73jw like buy a bag and mouse for just $50 and buy a hdd 1.5 gig for just &78 and external blueray drive for $90so you get the external blue ray and the built in super dvd drive. there's a lot of upgrade you can do for the price of $300 :)
JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
Just to clarify a few things that you're glossing over:The mouse in the G73Jw is far nicer than a cheap $20 optical... it uses the new HP Voodoo gaming mouse, only with a different coating (to match the G73 "stealth" coating). Best price you can find for this sort of mouse is around $40-$50.
As for the bag, even a rather generic backpack is going to cost at least $30, and I'd probably value this one at $40 or more.
The single 750GB HDD looks like it's the Seagate ST9750420AS (about $120), compared to two 500GB Seagate drives ($66 each), so that's a wash really but I suppose it makes adding an SSD easier (if you can find a caddy). FWIW, the only perfect fit for the caddy right now appears to be [l=this one]http://www.asusparts.eu/product_info.php?cPath=676...[/l]. Yup, that's almost $40 for a stupid little metal tray!
Then there's the Blu-ray/DVDR combo drive. Those go for $140, not $90 (unless you just want Blu-ray and DVD reading, with no recording capabilities or you buy a refurbished/used drive).
Add all that up and the difference in price for the mouse, backpack, and BD-Combo alone is at least $220, or $260 if you count the cost of a drive caddy.
We're then left with the final item you neglected to mention: the 1-year versus 2-year warranty. I can easily see the extra year of warranty being worth $100.
So in summary, the XA1 isn't "better" and there's no "truth" behind this (thanks for the double post by the way); it's simply another option where you get exactly what you pay for. The A1 comes with all the extras for $300 more, or you can get the stripped down model with $350 less of "stuff".
JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
Hmmm... links no longer work? Let's try again, as maybe I had the format wrong. [l=http://www.asusparts.eu/product_info.php?cPath=676...]HDD caddy[/l]XiZeL - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
ohh cmon asus 60gig sandforce SSD's are so cheap now why put in 2 hard drives when you could put an SSD for system and other for storage.gc_ - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
Here's a couple errors, please correct me if not:1. Table caption on first page (!)
actual: "ASUS G73Jh-A2 Specifications"
expect: ASUS G73JW-A1 Specifications
2. Battery life on fourth page
"Idle battery life improves by 49%, Internet battery life is up 26%, and x264 playback is UP 41%."
But the graphs and numbers tell a different story: x264 playback is DOWN 27.5%:
ASUS G73JH (i7-720QM + HD5870) (75wh): 80m
ASUS G73JW (i7-740QM + 460M) (85wh): 58m
(a difference in x264 decode hardware perhaps?)