ASUS 17.3" Republic of Gamers G703GI Laptop

Wow, what can I say... let me try to constrain my emotions and keep my ROG fan boy inside my pants for a moment and write an unbiased review to the best of my abilities. 1. \\CPU is amazing\\ it blows my dell's i7-7700HQ out of the water. x700HQ has been a staple for years and who wouldve thought 8th gen intel has come so far. it does everything so buttery smooth in windows 10 and 6-cores (12 threads) 2. \\GPU is amazing\\ This is one of the thinnest laptop if not the thinnest that I have ever seen or used with these type of specs. GTX 1070 max P is definitely a powerful beast. It runs BF1 at max settings at 1080p perfectly fine, with G-Sync turned on I would say at this point, built-in display limited at 1080p is becoming a let down but matters not, I am going to test the limits of it via a USB-C thunderbolt to DisplayPort cable and hook it up to an AGON AG352UCG6 monitor and run it at 120Hz G-Sync and see how it does at 3440x1440 3D Mark11 yielded around 22K of score most importantly is there is a switch for turning the dedicated graphics off, just using Intel that saves a lot of battery power if I am just doing a presentation on the go, it is nice they've thought of this instead of making a pure gaming machine (no laptop should be so single purposed) 3. \\Friggin fast SSD\\ I do graphics work and video editing work on this occassionally and it has kept up with loading Premier and transcoding the files very fast, thanks to the graphics card being utilized by Adobe. When transfering the large files, its kept up its paces too although I am not putting the drive to work nearly its advertised limits since I/O is still the limitation. There is a Dell thunderbolt 3 external SSD Drive out, I may buy that and test it out I believe this SSD inside the ASUS is an iteration of the Samsung 970 EVO, definitely one of the fastest out there (except for the Pro) the 1TB hybrid drive is no slouch either, enough to store some of the files (while the rest are on NAS), and hasnt been too much of a bottle beck 4. \\Clever chassis design\\ The chassis is pretty smart, since it has a piece on the bottom that pops open when I open the lid to a certain degree this has allowed for cooler air to enter from the bottom and sides, especially useful as a tilt that helps with my typing too This is particularly useful too when using on the lap or on the bed where bottom tends to get muffled with blankers or something soft with about an hour of encoding, the cooling setup inside has kept the machine not too noisy, doing its job of efficiently cooling the GPU and CPU the keyboard area has remained fairly cool, under 45C for most of the time 5. \\Decent screen\\ Screen and its bezels are the only partial let down of the machine visually, the quality is great and i havent noticed any blurring or tearing with G-Sync turned on color accuracy seems good enough for most graphics work although I still use an external monitor with higher DCI-P3 profile for video editing I havent experienced much input lag or slow response time so things are peachy there bezels though.... they are still large in a day and age where infinite edge displays and super narrow bezels are becoming common on $1300 laptops, yet this $2k machine is still rocking the thick arse bezels... what gives? 6. \\Fancy keyboard and lighting\\ There is some glow around the laptop and backlit keyboard is pretty colorful I am not one for the rainbow scheme of color in my gaming laptop so ive set it to just red and dim for now there are so many apps and settings that I havent gone deep enough to figure it all out yet and that is one of the problems... too many apps and settings! I suppose I am not geeky enough wanting to tinker with those all the time 7. \\Upcoming upgrades\\ Seeing how I am running close to the 16GB of RAM, I plan on adding another 16GB soon I opened up the mem bay and it is a good sign that both slots are operable, while only one is occupied by the 1x16GB 2666, I will add another 16GB soon Another upgrade is I plan on adding a thunderbolt 3 port hub that has more USB ports, displayport out (USB-C alt mode), gigabit ethernet hard to find one that exactly matches my need so will need to do a bit more research (watch out for compatibility with 4K monitors)