Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

***I HAVE AN ONGOING CASE & RMA WITH ASUS*** I will continue to update this review as it progresses. You can also follow along in the comments section. I also want to sincerely apologize to anyone that purchased this laptop after reading my original review and now has this keyboard issue too. I really did love this laptop and was very happy with it. I'm a system engineer for a Managed I.T. company and I love computers, I have been a computer nerd since middle school. I put a lot of effort into looking for a new gaming laptop and once I got it I wanted to share my genuine thoughts about it with the rest of you on Amazon. This keyboard issue is 100% an Asus issue, I did not spill anything on the keyboard or abuse it in any way. The lack of help from Amazon and Asus is unacceptable and I hope that I have not caused others to experience this as well. If you did buy this laptop I and you have any hint of this keyboard issue and are still with in the 30 day return windows I highly recommend that you return it right now and get your money back. **UPDATE JAN 5, 2017: I got my replacement laptop today. When I opened the box the first thing I saw was a paper with 90 day warranty for refurbished laptops which really made me unhappy. But after calling Asus and sitting on hold for a while I was assured that if anything happened to this laptop it would be covered under the warranty from my original new laptop purchase, which continues well after the 90 day refurbished notice I got. I inspected the laptop closely for any physical defects and when I didn't find any I agreed to keep it and hung up with support. It still doesn't sit quite right with me that I didn't get a brand new laptop in retail packaging but since I can find nothing wrong with this one and I still get the new laptop warranty I'm willing to give this one a shot. So far, so good, as in the keyboard actually works. I put my SSD back in the replacement laptop and booted it up. Everything came back up fine, Windows was activated still and no new drivers needed to be installed, which is good. I am going to take this laptop with me to work for the next few weeks just so that I use it every day. I want to make sure that this one doesn't have the slightest sign of the keyboard issues before I consider this issue actually resolved. **UPDATE DEC 22, 2016: I finally got an update on my RMA. From the email from ASUS... "Your RMA status was updated yesterday, the technicians were unable to service your unit so they will be providing you with a replacement unit. You should receive an email pertaining to the details of the replacement process." I'm still waiting on the aforementioned email as of Dec 26. **UPDATE NOV 26, 2016: I sent another email to Asus this morning since I didn't get a reply in over 24 hours. Two hours later I was sent an email with a link to create an online RMA. After creating the RMA I contacted Asus customer service via chat to get a pre-paid FedEx shipping label. **UPDATE NOV 24: My keyboard is no longer working and I have emailed Asus tech support. Tried the latest bios update and the keyboard firmware update, neither worked. In fact I think the keyboard firmware update is what killed completely it because previously I could get the keyboard to work when this happened by shutting down and rebooting, now that doesn't work anymore, it's totally dead. I thought this was a Windows 10 issue because I have seen Windows 10 do strange things at the login screen before but obviously this is not that, this is an Asus firmware problem. If Asus can fix this issue for me in a prompt amount of time I will restore my previous 4 star review, but for now I have a $1,500 laptop that I can't use without a USB keyboard attached... unacceptable. ORIGINAL REVIEW: I shopped around for almost a year before finally buying this Asus ROG Strix GL702VM-DB71. I looked at gaming laptops from Asus, Acer, MSI, and Alienware. The appearance of the laptop is just as important to me as the performance. The Alienware laptops were just overpriced, even on sale. The MSI laptops, despite some good specs, looked like bland square boxes with no unique appearance characteristics. The Acer laptops had a variety of poor reviews, some had poorly laid out keyboards and most were difficult to install hardware upgrades. As soon as I saw this Asus Strix I was interested, it looked really nice, I liked the design of the case and the addition of some tasteful lighting effects and once I saw that it had the next generation of Nvidia graphics I was sold. I purposely bought the model with a traditional 1TB hard drive because it is cheaper to purchase and install your own solid state drive (SSD) than it is to get a model with it preinstalled. The laptop arrive safe and sound in a well packaged box. After unboxing the laptop I booted it up and before messing with Windows at all I immediately made an image of the factory installed 1TB hard drive using Acronis. Installing the solid state drive was easy, it's accessible after removing the bottom plastic cover. With the new Adata 480GB SSD installed I restored the Acronis image and it booted right up. I have been using the laptop for about a week now. I have played Doom, Just Cause 3, and Star Trek Online on it at max graphic settings. As others have said, this laptop produces significant heat but I have not experienced any noticeable game lag or dropped frames because of the laptop running hot. I installed Core Temp and set a custom shutdown temp of 90 celsius, which the laptop did reach when playing Just Cause 3 but since it was not hesitating or dropping frames I increased the Core Temp setting to 100 celsius and have not had any problems since. I also run with a laptop cooler under this laptop, it is one from Walmart but it's pretty nice with two 80mm fans blowing air up on the bottom of the laptop. And now for the nitpicking (I'm quite OCD). There are a few things that could have been done better on this laptop. Firstly, there are only 3 USB ports total, two of which are on the right side. I feel like 3 USB ports on a laptop that doesn't have a DVD tray is too few, 4-5 ports would be better (some of the MSI laptops have 4-5). Also the fact that two of the ports are on the right side shows some poor planning as most people use their right hand for a mouse, especially when gaming and if you are using more than one wired device the wires can get in the way of your mouse. Another issue is that the right shift key is too narrow and more than a few times I end up pressing the up arrow key by accident. And lastly the plastic case shows fingerprint smudges pretty easily. The laptop did come with some bloatware but no more than I see on most other laptops I work on and removal of the junk programs didn't take long. Windows 10 has been working fine for me so far. I have been using 10 since it came out and have figured out some tricks I like to do to make it better (IMO). The very first thing I recommend to anyone using Windows 10 is download and install Classic Start (you can get it at ninite or classicshell) this will give you a proper start menu back and make the OS function more like Windows 7. If you are not going to be using the metro part of Windows 10 (the apps that are designed for mobile devices and smartphones) then turn off or uninstall as much of it as possible. You can do that in the privacy settings menu, just go though and turn off everything. You can use a program called Ccleaner to easily uninstall the metro apps that auto install with Windows 10 (and it's updates) without even going into the app store. Lastly, download and use a proper browser, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer are not your friend, use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Despite the few nitpicking things I don't like, over all this laptop is very nice and I look forward to gaming on it for many years to come.