Great laptop, poor thermal compound application
At a generation old, 960M notebooks with quad core CPUs have definitely hit the budget sweetspot for gaming notebooks on the lower end of the price bracket. The Haswell i7 is completely current, in the sense that any i5 or i7 since Sandy Bridge is still basically current, though the hyperthreading produces more heat than the dubious performance gains are worth (a quad core with no HT would frankly be preferable, especially for gaming). The 960M isn't blazing fast, about equal to a desktop 750TI, but still a good midrange mobile chip and more than fast enough to play current games at medium to high settings. Mass Effect Andromeda plays well at medium, Mechwarrior Online at high, Killing Floor 2, War Thunder, Skyrim SE all play nicely at higher/highest settings, all at 1080P, and the 2GB of VRAM doesn't end up being a bottleneck most of the time (though mods can eat it up in Skyrim). The step up to the 970M is worthwhile, but simply exacts a very large price difference on the used market right now. Strange as it may be, I would take off half a star for the inclusion of hyperthreading, especially when I can't turn it off easily (just via Process Lasso).
Beyond that, it's a gaming laptop. It's not light, the battery life is average to poor (3 hours with some effort, maybe 4 at most), but it's mobile and plays games well.
I paid 500. That's a good deal. I would not pay more than 600-650 or so for a notebook with a 960M. Look around for a 970M if you're going to start bumping into the 700 on up range.
***IMPORTANT***
Where I do have to knock this laptop is Asus' job with the thermal dissipation setup. The system is fundamentally adequate, if not fantastic (2 fans would have been better), but the overapplication of TIM caused the machine to overheat during regular use. A quick disassembly, cleaning with arcticlean 1+2 (91% alcohol works too), and proper application of good TIM, I like Shin-Etsu X23 series or Arctic Silver Ceramique for long-lasting use with poor pressure mounts (stay away from diamond on bare chips), amounting to about two hours of total work, made this machine run quite cool, GPU temps of about 70, CPU temps of 75ish, even during stress testing at average ambient temperatures. For me, this is no issue, just a quick and perfectly safe touch up, so I give this a 4/5. It was actually a bit of fun! For anyone who isn't comfortable with basic hardware work, building PCs, etc, and doesn't want to pay a shop extra to do this, this could be a deal breaker as mine throttled badly at first. I think my machine was an outlier, honestly, since Asus does not, in my experience, mass produce overheating machines, but I'm reporting on the unit I got. YMMV.
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-owned