ASUS G60J gaming laptop

Review by Julian Prokaza on Fri 23 October 2009

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Summary

Guide price
£1,699
Rating
 5 out of 6
Good
Incredibly fast; specification well-matched to gaming
Bad
Screen resolution a little low; too much keyboard flex
Verdict
It’s not a laptop for everyone, but the ASUS G60J certainly delivers in spades for its target audience of itinerant gamers. The screen resolution could be higher, but there’s no knocking the rest of its specification.
Manufacturer
Asus

Review

Quad-core processors are the next big thing in laptop technology, but it will be a while before we see them used as widely as dual-core chips. Power consumption and heat are two problems that Intel has yet to crack with its current mobile Core 2 Quad line-up, which is why OEMs are only using them for big and beefy laptops like the ASUS G60J.

The G60J is the latest in ASUS’ range of ‘Republic of Gamers’ gaming laptops — portables that put performance above all else (including portability). Although big and heavy, ASUS has at least made some attempt to keep the weight down with the G60J.

It’s a 16in laptop (there’s also an otherwise identical 15.6in G51 model) and so can still slip easily into a laptop bag. Even so, at 3.3kg, this isn’t a laptop to pack for the daily commute, but it’s far less effort to drag something like this to a LAN party than a desktop tower case and TFT monitor.

Manufacturers often feel the need to deck out their gaming laptops with garish designs and pulsing LEDs, but ASUS has shown a remarkable amount of restraint with the G60J. The only extra bit of illumination on the outside is a small, glowing Republic of Gamers badge on the dark blue lid, although it is framed by a bizarre ‘streak’ of tiny chessboard pattern.

Gamers may be a little disappointed with the G60J’s screen, not least since the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M graphics chipset is capable of running games at much higher resolutions that its native 1366 x 768. We were also disappointed to see that the curved corners of the screen bezel also overlap the display, leading to a few lost pixels.

If you need to plug in an external keyboard to get your frag on with a gaming laptop, you might as well buy a desktop PC, so it’s good to see that ASUS has opted for a reasonable quality chiclet design for the G60J. The keyboard is full-size, but the numeric keypad has been condensed and the cursor keys have been crammed in next to the right-hand Ctrl and Shift keys — not that this matters much for gaming.

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ASUS G60J specification

Processor
Intel Core i7-820QM (1.73GHz)
Memory
4Gn (8Gb max)
Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M (1Gb)
Hard disk
500Gb x2
Optical drive
BD-ROM combo
Floppy drive
NA
Screen
16in LED backlit (1366 x 768)
Connectivity
802.11n, Bluetooth, USB x4, USB/eSATA combo, HDMI, VGA, ExpressCard/54
Other
SD Card reader, web cam
Operating system
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Size
375 x 265 x 41mm
Weight
3.3kg
BatteryEater Classic
50m
BatteryEater Reader
1h 18m

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