Thank you Asus for loaning us this laptop to review!

I have been a proud Asus laptop owner for the past year.  My 17” Republic of Gamers (ROG) G75VW has served me well.  One downside to my current laptop is that it is 11 pounds and does not fit into most laptop bags.  Another drawback is that it only has the Nvidia GTX 660M graphics card so the battery life is pretty poor at an hour and a half, tops.  Both of these problems are nonexistent with the ROG GL551JM-DH71. In fact, I was able to use the GL551J all day on and off on a single charge.  The estimated battery life is five hours, but that fluctuates depending on what you are doing.  It can go longer if you're relying on the Intel graphics and not heavily using the audio.  Gaming on the battery is doable, but it's a good idea to keep the charger handy for LAN parties.

The 15” size is great for gaming; the only noticeable sacrifice is the smaller keyboard and keys.  I love the full size arrow keys on my laptop and I found the smaller ones harder to use.  I like how the WASD keys are accentuated with transparent edges so that they are more noticeable in the dark.  The red backlighting is nice, but I prefer the white lettering on my current laptop keyboard since it’s easier to see.  While the illuminated ROG logo on the back of the matte LCD screen will attract gamers, it will deter professionals who like to have dual purpose systems.  

I felt a little silly at first when I could not figure out the simple task of turning the laptop on.   There is no obvious power button on the system itself.  The power key is located on the upper right hand side of the keyboard.  Everything else was easy to locate and utilize.  

This laptop is equipped with 3 USB 3.0 ports, a mini DisplayPort 1.2 and a HDMI 1.4 port.  An Ethernet jack and a single audio plug are available as well.  Standard features include a DVDRW drive (why no Blu-Ray?), 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L RAM and an Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU.  The cpu's normal speed is 2.50GHZ with a turbo boost of 3.5GHz.  

There are three variants of the GL551JM laptop.  The version we reviewed has a 1TB 7200 hard drive and 802.11 a/g/n wireless while the more expensive GL551JM-EH71 sports a 256GB SSD and b/g/n wireless.  The least expensive Gl551JK-EH71 has a 750GB hard drive, b/g/n wireless and a GeForce 850M GDDR3 instead of the 860M GDDR5 in the others.  For the extra $50 it’s absolutely worth having the more powerful GPU and disk space.  

There is a slot for a mini MSATA SSD for caching.  Currently the biggest size available is 64GB and sells for roughly $60.  In order to install the half sized drive, you have to take off the bottom of the laptop.  The DVDRW and hard drive had to be removed and the bottom cover had to be pried apart from the back using a small flathead screwdriver.