The Asus design team did a great job of building in good ventilation to keep the unit cooled without generating disturbingly high noise levels. Yes, you can hear the cooling fans spin up under a heavy game load, but the effect is not as objectionable as it is on some other gaming laptops I've lived with. And if you're wearing a headset, you may not hear the fans at all.

The keyboard offers good tactile feedback, but the depth of key presses seems shallow compared with the feel of other gaming keyboards I've used. The spacing between keys is very good, and my overall impression is positive.

The storage configuration on our test unit seemed a little bizarre, however. The G73SW-A1 unit we tested arrived with a pair of Seagate 7200-rpm, 500GB hard drives. That is all well and good, but each drive shipped with two separate partitions, which results in four total partitions you need to manage. In a dual-drive system, I'd much prefer either two drives each with one big partition, or even a RAID 1 configuration for a little added data security.

Overall, the Asus G73SW offers good performance at a reasonable price. It isn't exactly svelte, but it isn't too much of a problem to carry around. Given the overall performance, that's not too big a burden at all.