A 17-inch notebook is going to be big, there’s just no way around it. But after reviewing Malibal’s ginormous X7200 desktop replacement in our Holiday issue, Asus’s eight-pound, 11.8-ounce G73Jw-A1 seems highly portable by comparison. And at $1,800—one-third the price of the X7200—the G73Jw-A1 also seems highly affordable.
You get a lot of notebook for that price. At its center is a Core i7-740 quad-core mobile CPU, with a base clock of 1.73GHz and Turbo Boost potential up to 2.93GHz. Asus kicks that up a notch with a one-button overclock feature called Twin Turbo Mode, which pushes the CPU as much as 100MHz higher. According to Asus, Twin Turbo’s impact is most noticeable in multithreaded apps. And we did see a 6 percent difference when running MainConcept with and without Twin Turbo. But we also observed a similar difference in scores when we ran Photoshop, a mostly single-threaded app, both ways. Hey, we’ll take any extra performance we can get.
