Gadgetory

the Republic of gamers g550 JK from the Seuss aside from being the notebook that holds the world record for the highest altitude terrestrial land party yeah that's right ten of these bad boys ascended to the top of Mount Elbert as part of a collaboration between tech syndicate Austin Evans and Newegg and us where we all play Doom at 14,400 feet but aside from that it's actually a fairly down-to-earth gaming laptop with a premium mainstream price girl-next-door good looks and solid build quality with its power loss protection affordability and performance the SP 924 may data makes upgrading to an SSD remarkably safe and simple hardware wise the g550 JK is appropriately equipped for the price the core i7 47:10 HQ quad core is suitable for gaming and light content creation the single 8 gig stick of RAM is enough for gaming but would love to have a dual channel partner for a total of 16 gigs for heavier work the GTX 850 m GPU will be enough for light to medium gaming duties and the 750 gigs 7200 rpm hard drive strikes a good balance between storage space and cost and then of course there's the usual wireless AC Bluetooth webcam etc now the keen-eyed among you might have already started noticing some similarities between this and the n550 JK also for masseuse and if you did then Bravo Watson because they are indeed very closely related but for those of you not familiar with the n550 will do a physical overview the back of the screen has a beautiful brushed aluminum finish that's actually surprisingly easy to clean so definitely brownie points they're not quite sure how they did it other than that all you'll find back there is a reflective assist logo and an illuminated Republic of gamers one on the bottom we find two cooling intakes for the dual fan cooling system that is nearly silent at idle reasonably quiet under load and does a great job of keeping the laptop cool our GPU state around 80 degrees running Unigine heaven even with the overclocked option enabled in GPU tweak and more importantly the GPU was running consistently at around 1.17 gigahertz also on the bottom we find a very large speaker girl with four driver behind it that must be contributing to the surprisingly loud and solid content consumption experience especially given the notebook slim 1.1 inch form factor because let's face it when it comes to speakers there's only so much you can do within a confined space and I was impressed but then I guess a soos knows that too because they also include this sonic master external subwoofer thing it's not the kind of thing I imagined I'd use very often but it actually does dramatically improve the performance of the already above-average built-in speakers onto the sides we get an SD card reader a USB 3 port a DVD writer and a Kensington lock then on the left side we've got a headphone / microphone jack 2 more USB 3 ports DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs a hardwired Ethernet port and finally the 8 inch jack for the external sub and then finally power in and it might seem like a trivial detail but the red beveled edge here above the port's actually looks even more striking in person than it does on video looks really really nice but just like for people a notebook looks can only get it so far and once we open this baby up we find the stuff that really matters and it looks like we're going to start on a high note my biggest complaint about the last G Series notebook that we checked out was the TN screen that suffered from some wicked color shift a soos has done away with that on the G 550 JK and gone with a matte finish 15.6 inch 1080p IPS screen instead it may not have the most amazing contrast ratio in the world and an IPS display won't give you the same lightning-fast pixel response times that a TN will but the viewing angles are solid colors pop like they just aren't able to on a TN and I even found it quite usable outdoors as long as I kept the screen out of super bright direct sunlight on top of a mountain and the good news keeps coming the red LED backlit chiclet keyboard has three brightness levels and is set into a pretty solid aluminum wrist rest that is aluminum so is going to stain eventually but thankfully uses a more matte style anodized finish that is much easier to clean and more resistant to wear than some of the other finishes that I've seen on notebook wrist rests over the past few years aside from the keyboard we've got a power button a perplexing dedicated button to access the web storage that asus includes with the notebook and a click pad the click enos of the pad is actually a bit too stiff for my tastes but it's kind of academic since I prefer touch to click or pressing the proper clicky buttons at the bottom anyway the big thing I look for in a touchpad is its ability to reject my fingers and my palms when I'm trying to use it two handed or when I'm trying to type and in this regard it performs admirably it also supports the usual gestures through a Seuss's utility one of the many mostly useful things that they see spree installs on the notebook including a facial unlock utility a USB charging utility and their power for gear power management utility the only really questionable pre-installed items I've removed right away were a trial of McAfee live safe and some wild tangent game thing battery life was about what I expected the notebook lasted for 57 minutes running heaven starting with a full charge but of course will the more typical workload and videos optimist technology hands off display duties to the onboard graphics which allowed it to last for just shy of three hours when browsing the internet listening to music watching YouTube videos something that I'd consider to be a fairly heavy and yet not gaming workload so gone are the days of tolerating half an hour battery life from our you know high powered desktop replacement in gaming notebooks which I guess leads us into our conclusion about the g550 JK this isn't really a little brother to the beastly G 750 Jay Z so much as it's more like a sexier trim level of the n550 the 750 is kind of like the 6 Series in the family and this is more like the 3 Series if we were to make a car analogy it's still tuned it's still fun to drive but it's overclocked gtx 850 m is not in the same league as an overclocked 880 m which raises an interesting question what is the competition for this notebook the ge60 apache from msi features gddr5 memory for improved graphics performance and an RGB backlit keyboard that comes up a cost of extra thickness any Seuss's own n550 JK has a touchscreen but a slower CPU and only a 5400 rpm lb a higher capacity harddrive so that's where the g550 JK comes in it's got its own set of compromises I mean I'd have liked to see an SSD instead of a hard drive or at least an M sadder and got to upgrade slot but it's beautiful and solidly built it delivers very respectable specs for the price and that's not a bad place to be speaking of not bad places to be this one was at the top of a mountain setting a world record and we are giving it away to one of you now as you may have already noticed during the b-roll for this video it is covered with a whole bunch of cool signatures from people who were also at the top of the mountain including loganing came from tech syndicate Paul and Kyle from Newegg Austin from Austin Evans and of course me and Luc from the show you're watching right now so guys check out the link in the video description for details on how you can win this bad boy like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment under the video if you have suggestions for future videos or just generally comments also check out the link in the video description for our sponsor as well as how to support us so you can send us a monthly contribution you can buy cool t-shirts like this one or you can change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate codes we got a smell kick back whenever you buy stuff that pretty much wraps it up guys thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already