I have an Asus G51J that's starting to show its age, and I'm thinking about potential replacements. I'd like to keep the same screen size, which is basically perfect for my range of use cases, and I figure I can justify to myself spending something in the $1000-$1500 range. Not too picky apart from that, and I'm not up to date enough on computer hardware to really know what's going to be the bottleneck on whatever systems I'm looking at. Don't need resolutions >1080p, don't need a touch screen (though if I'm being forced into Windows 8, it probably wouldn't hurt), don't need it to be particularly light, and while an SSD is always nice, I don't mind that much if it takes a little bit longer to turn on and launch applications.
I've really liked my current Asus, and so the upcoming http/www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/G550JK/overview/ might be a logical successor. While it still has that silly "Republic of Gamers" logo, it's definitely a lot more stylish than the G51J, which is a plus. It's GPU is a GTX850M, however, whereas a lot of similarly priced machines seem to be going with the 860M or higher. Don't know how much of a difference that makes in practice, but it's the one thing that jumped out in the specs.
Also looking at the Lenovo Y50. No one can claim they don't make quality hardware, and it's a very nice looking machine. A bit bothered by the lack of an optical drive though. While it hardly matters for new games since they're all on Steam these days, I've got plenty of old disks lying around that I might decide to revisit, and being able to play DVDs would be nice too. Any big disadvantages to an external drive vs one that's built in? Never needed one before, so I'm curious about reliability, read/write speed, etc.
Of course there are zillions of other options out there - I've just been looking at these two since I've had experience with both brands.
Any thoughts, recommendations? Thanks in advance.
I've really liked my current Asus, and so the upcoming http/www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/G550JK/overview/ might be a logical successor. While it still has that silly "Republic of Gamers" logo, it's definitely a lot more stylish than the G51J, which is a plus. It's GPU is a GTX850M, however, whereas a lot of similarly priced machines seem to be going with the 860M or higher. Don't know how much of a difference that makes in practice, but it's the one thing that jumped out in the specs.
Also looking at the Lenovo Y50. No one can claim they don't make quality hardware, and it's a very nice looking machine. A bit bothered by the lack of an optical drive though. While it hardly matters for new games since they're all on Steam these days, I've got plenty of old disks lying around that I might decide to revisit, and being able to play DVDs would be nice too. Any big disadvantages to an external drive vs one that's built in? Never needed one before, so I'm curious about reliability, read/write speed, etc.
Of course there are zillions of other options out there - I've just been looking at these two since I've had experience with both brands.
Any thoughts, recommendations? Thanks in advance.