Pros: Long battery life with a Samsung 840 SSD.(4-6 hours YMMV) Fits a Swissgear bag comfortably. Handles any modern computer task. Plenty of expansion ports (for a laptop). Integrated DVD drive. Sharp modern screen. Trinity setup with discrete GPU

Cons: First, the gloss finish on the laptop makes it look nice, but it is slippery. I would have been much happier with a matte finish. I spent extra $ on laptop upgrades I wish I could have paid extra for. The spare 750GB 5400RPM drive is useful for portable storage but the ram it came with I have no use for. Not quite a gaming laptop, unfortunately even with impressive hardware specifications. Previously mentioned software - 40GB image. I would have been much happier with 1GB of VDDR5 than 2GB of VDDR3.

Overall Review: As far as gaming performance, I play World of Tanks. My minimum requirements were a "high" view range (not maximum) and minimum (low and off) HDR graphics and maintaining a minimum of 30FPS. This laptop maintains 25 FPS, with occasional drops into the teens. I have spent the last week trying to eek every bit performance from this laptop - with varying results. AMD crossfire is supported but not used by the developers of the games I play. I believe it to be more of business politics and less of software engineering feats. The single thing ASUS could do to improve this already manufactured laptop is better reliability of the AMD trinity "turbo core". The games I play are single threaded, and I see 10-15 FPS jumps when one of the cores is running at 3.2GHZ. If this feature would be stable and not shift through PStates on every core every couple of seconds, it would bring this laptop up a considerable notch. I am not asking for world peace - just flatten out already available performance. Upgrades purchased : ADATA XPG 8GB SODIMM DDR3 memory Samsung 840 256gb SSD Rosewill notebook cooler

Pros: If you are looking for the best performance on a budget, this is your chip. I built two systems with similar hardware except for the CPU - one with this and the other with a core 7 265. I can't tell a difference in Star Citizen, one of the most demanding games on a CPU.

Cons: None, really. I have to test the 65W TDP, that sounds incredibly low for the performance.

Overall Review: If you are looking to build a new system today and upgrade in a few years to twice the CPU, this is is your chip.