On a secret gaming mission.

Asus wants to copy the design of a Stealth Bomber with its newest gaming machine, the G733h. The state-of-the-art technology is apt, in any case: A Core i7 CPU and an ATI Mobility Radeon 5870 graphic card give hope for a great performance. But a Stealth Fighter also needs a quiet operating noise. Find out in our hands-on if Asus' mission "Stealth Gaming" is successful.

Asus has even listened to its users' comments in terms of appearance and removed all glossy surfaces, except for the high-gloss screen. The design, made in a sober black, is now dominated by roughened plastic components. The wrist-rest has been covered with a rubber coating. It's pleasant for the hands and also prevents slipping in heated gaming battles.

One unique design component isn't seen at first sight but without doubt as soon as the notebook is opened. The display isn't mounted quite completely at the notebook's rear, but about 6 centimeters further towards the front. This is because the G73 has two massive fan grids, which are the most important part of the innovative cooling system. The fans built-in there are apparently so big that the notebook already has a height of 5.8 centimeters in the back area.

If the monitor had been mounted above that, the G73 would probably have not fitted into any case any longer. Since all heat developing parts have been moved towards the back, the device had to be built quite high in its back. This was used right away to tilt the keyboard by five degrees so that a more ergonomic typing results. Thus, the G73 is lower on the front – the narrowest spot only has a height of 2.1 centimeters. Aside that, the notebook has a width of 42 centimeters and a depth of 32.2 centimeters.

All single parts have been matched to fit perfectly; even the gaps of the pre-series model tested by us were minute. Additionally, all components have been merged tight with each other so that shivers or creaking are strange to the G73Jh.

The case even stays stable when it's picked up at a corner. However, the user won't likely want to pick up the device very often with a weight of almost 4 kilograms, and especially not at only one corner. Since all high-performance components have been placed in the back, the weight has been distributed quite unevenly. You could quickly lose the hold of the rather light in the front but unexpectedly heavy in the back notebook.

Asus has built-in not more than all necessary ports. Thus, you'll find on the left, from front to back: the headphone-out, the microphone-in, one USB 2.0 port, a BluRay or DVD drive depending on the configuration, a further USB port and the gigabit LAN interface.

A 4-in-1 cardreader for multimedia cards, SD cards, a memory stick or memory stick pro on the right. That's followed by two USB 2.0 ports, a HDMI interface and the VGA-out. The DC-in in is fed into the case behind that. Aside from the battery, there is only a connection for a Kensington Lock on the back.

An eSATA-out or a FireWire port would have been nice, but at least there are 4 USB ports to make up. Standard 802.11n WLAN is equally onboard as a 2.0 megapixel webcam above the screen and, of course, a microphone.

The 17.3 inch display has a FullHD resolution, so 1920 x 1080 pixels, has an LED backlight and has an aspect ratio of 16:9. The objective image impression was rich colors without evident gray veiling or falsifications.

The viewing angles were also alright. The colors were misrepresented as of a certain angle in every direction but we had a good range of choice in terms of sitting position in front of the display. The image remained true for a long time especially on the horizontal plane.

Because the display has been made with a high-gloss finish, you have to count with annoying reflections when the G73Jh is used outdoors, which won't likely be very often, or in very bright interiors.

We were also interested in the performance – after all we were holding a prototype with ATI's new Radeon HD 5870 in our hands for the very first time. We could check out Cinebench, 3DMark06, as well as the games, Dirt and Anno 1404 before the kind ladies and gentlemen of the Asus booth requested their device's return.

The Asus G73Jh is equipped with an Intel Core i7-720M that has a clock rate of 1.6 to 2.8 GHz, aside from ATIs new mobile high-performance card with a 1 GByte GDDR5. Additionally, our test system had a gigantic 8 GByte DDR3 1066 RAM, divided into four 2048 MByte modules. Incidentally, a model with 6 GByte RAM is also supposed to be available.

Two 320 GByte sized hard disks from Hitachi are used, which work with 7200 revolutions per minute. Models with two 500 GByte disks are alternately available.

In view of all these fast components, but especially with its extremely fast graphic card, it's not surprising that the Asus G73Jh scores extremely good results in the benchmarks. And that although Asus has assured us that the drivers aren't final.

The Asus G73Jh achieved 11990 3DMarks in 3DMark06 (1280x1024) and beats notebooks with a Radeon 4780 by almost 2000 points. As all Asus gaming notebooks, the G73Jh has a turbo mode that is called Twin Turbo and is supposed to overclock the graphic card as well as the Intel Core i7. Asus even starts with the lower clockrate of 1.6 GHz that is used when all four processor cores are used and increases them.

The G73Jh reaches 12872 points in 3DMark06 with enabled Twin Turbo mode. With this, the Radeon 5780 is the fastest single graphic card in our benchmark list. The card confirms this also in Cinebench, which rates the notebook's graphic computing with 6232 points, the second highest rate ever measured by us.

Accordingly, the G73Jh didn't have many problems with either of our games: Anno 1404 ran with 60.9 frames in a FullHD resolution and ultra-high details settings marvelously smooth. Even the cutting-edge race game Dirt could be played fairly smoothly in FullHD and ultra-high details with 28.7 frames. All this, however, proves that currently even the most efficient mobile graphic card can't grant a long-term future sustainability in terms of HD gaming. If the games get even more demanding, it'll get tight for the HD 5870 in FullHD and high details.

But we were impressed by the Asus G73Jh's performance data anyway: Current games shouldn't be a problem even in FullHD and with full details. If Asus optimizes the drivers then perhaps even higher rates will be possible.