Asus
G Series G56JK 15.6" Notebook PC (G56JK-DM076H)

ASUS G56JK

All-important with a portable gaming rig is the weight, since you’re the one that has to carry it around. In this case, ASUS’ 15-incher weighs in at just 2.7kg fully loaded, which is light enough to be mistaken for some standard notebooks. Until you look under the hood, that is, though the outer design will give you a pretty good idea of what is in store.

The 15.6-inch display doesn’t pull any punches, being a glare-resistant full HD LCD panel so you might as well be gaming on a full desktop. But that splendid screen hasn’t come to the party alone. Oh no, it’s brought friends.

Friends like Intel’s Core i7-4710MQ processor, which is able to hit speeds of up to 3.5GHz thanks to its 6MB of cache and blazing Intel interior tech. Also present are 8GB of RAM, half the complement of ASUS’ G750 but still more than enough to make your games run as smooth as silk.

In terms of storage, you’re looking at a full terabyte. The G56 drops the SSD but that leads to a corresponding price drop as well. The illuminated chiclet keyboard is also present and accounted for, so you should be able to frag in the dark with few issues.

Graphics are Nvidia’s turf and for this machine, the 2GB GeForce GT 850M has been used. Some of the latest and greatest of games will need to run on slightly lower settings but there aren’t many. For the most part it’s all eye-candy and frame-rates.

For the rest, you’re looking at Bang & Olufson sound, ASUS’ SonicMaster is popular in ROG setups and rightfully so. There’s also HDMI out, VGA out (in case), USB 3.0 support for everything and headphone/mic jacks for some team-based trash talk. Oh yes, and a multi-card reader. For sorting out gaming things that are unrelated to the PC itself.