ASUS ROG GL552VW-DH71 15.6" Gaming Laptop - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 2GB GDDR5, Intel Core i7-6700HQ, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD - ROG Metallic Black | Perfect for Esports, VR Gaming & Content Creation

I spent a very long time monitoring laptops before I was forced into the purchase by my old laptop dying. I knew I wanted to spend around $1000 for a laptop, but I also wanted to be able to comfortably play any games on the go. After many mind changes I finally settled on this ROG model. I'll go into detail below, but for those looking for a quick answer I love this laptop and am very happy with the purchase.Appearance: I definitely am a fan of strong gaming computers, but I do not like the over the top flashy model's that to me scream "I'm not a professional." This laptop is a nice mesh between the two cultures. The bottom is a sturdy feeling plastic material with great looking red LED keys. Black and red is probably my favorite color combo and this laptop matches that. The lid is a metal cover on the outside that feels top of the line and not cheap. It's fairly thick for a 15 inch laptop so don't expect a hyper thin model like a lot of the business laptops. The logo isn't too flashy and looks good on the back tooBattery: This is probably the lowest point of the laptop. They don't mislead with their estimates much more than any other laptop does. With any extensive use the laptop lasts about 2.5 hours on battery. Not great, but 9 times out of 10 I'm using it near an outlet so it doesn't bother me.Display: My criticism of this display is that it doesn't seem to handle text too well out of the box. The matte screen makes text look blurry and out of place with the default settings. I was able to modify the display settings through windows to get it to look better, but it can be frustrating. Otherwise though the matte looks beautiful with games. The screen's crispness makes even lower end things look exceptionally good. I'm used to 1440p on my desktop, but honestly this was almost as good looking if not better at 1080p. Since the main purpose for me here was for games on the go the text issue isn't as huge so I would still give this display an A+Performance: I have a fairly high end desktop that I built so I was hoping to get pretty decent specs out of a laptop, but with how infrequently I expect to use it, I didn't want to break the bank. I'm also a stickler for getting my money's worth on hardware and not paying for appearances (cough cough mac/alienware cough cough). This was easily the best deal I could find for performance potential vs cost. After receiving the laptop I can confidently say I was correct in my expectations. I can play most things with little issues. So far I've ran League, Ori and the Blind Forest, Hand of Fate, Starcraft 2, Shadow Warrior, and various smaller indie games on full graphics settings with very little fps drop. The more intensive games like WoW and Witcher need to be dropped down a few notches to get 60fps, but it is definitely doable without having to make them look like garbage. I bought the non-ssd version and added one myself so load times are very quick and I was also able to dual-boot with Linux Mint easily enough. I didn't see much use for the extra GB of VRAM running at 1080p with a 960M. The performance increase would most likely be minimal. If you don't have an M.2 SSD though it might be worth paying for the high priced model.Other thoughts: One thing I would say is if you plan on putting in your own SSD the laptop does not come with a screw for the M.2 ssd slot. You'll need a 2.0 x 3mm screw. I stole one from the network card on my old laptop, but hopefully you can prepare youself and not have to scrap old parts. Also make sure you go into the nvidia settings and confirm the laptop is focusing the 960M vs the integrated card. You don't want to be playing anything on that Intel chip. It wont be a fun time.For the price when I bought it, this was probably the best bang for your buck laptop you could buy. Now they have a lot of the 10xx models, but this definitely still holds it's own with today's games. As someone who prefers higher end tech I would recommend this to anyone that can swing the money.