Asus G73J was designed in such a way that it reminds of the American F-117 Nighthawk, the “invisible” plane, which becomes evident at first sight. Even the material which the notebook was made of is difficult to define, giving a feel of a chiselled rubber surface. Anyway, a matt surface is completely different from what we usually get to see on gaming notebooks, which is a welcome change. Being that demanding games usually get pretty violent as well, the G73J fits perfectly with its “military” design. The notebook really is huge, and the design was cleverly used to make the necessary implementations in an elegant and practical way. Hardware this powerful requires a strong cooling system as well, so Asus opted for a system with double ventilation openings, placed on the back and reminiscent of blowout engines. Other than looking good and fitting the concept of a “jet” design, this solution enables all the heat to be carried away from the user. The part of the notebook in direct contact with the user (palm rests and the keyboard) remains cool during use, which goes to confirm the efficiency of the cooling system.

The frontal part of the notebook is significantly thinner than the rear one, and the imminent incline of the keyboard surface thus inevitably improves ergonomics. Chiclet keyboard has backlight installed and bends a bit on its larger part. The key markings are transparent, which means that the light shines through them as well, instead of only appearing around the keys themselves, which is a better solution than the one present on the G60J model. A small “Enter” and the right cursor key embedded in the numerical part of the keyboard are details we didn’t fancy too much. The upper left part of the casing houses three additional keys. The first one turns the backlight on and off, the second one is for the Twin Turbo mode, and the third one for Splendid technology.

The touchpad is huge and has multi-touch support, which causes a wrong interpretation of user’s moves every now and then (instead of moving the cursor in the X axis, the touchpad activates the endless scroll function). This phenomenon is not related to this specific model; we’ve seen this problem surfacing on most models with multi-touch support. Other than that, you’ll have no negative remarks as to its functioning. The single-piece button below the touchpad is also rather big and requires a somewhat stronger push in order to react. As strange as it may sound, its size may present a challenge in the beginning, since you’re likely to find yourself pushing the middle, inactive part of the button when going for the right-click. Luckily, a bit of practice makes everything right. Saying that the display is excellent is almost an understatement. Full HD resolution and a 17.3” screen size will make you completely shun the fact that you’re sitting in front of a notebook, and not a desktop PC. Uniform LED backlight, sharpness, vivid colours, good viewing angles… It’s all there really. If any flaw can be found, then it’s the brightness, which could’ve been better.