Gaming laptop

[Lemur]

So have you loaded it up with some modern games to see how they run?

[Ice]

You have a nice graphics card. The 680 was a good call as anything lower would struggle with higher end games.

[SwordsMaster]

So have you loaded it up with some modern games to see how they run?

Well, now:
Max Payne 3 - highest settings - smooth as silk.
Dishonoured: - had to disable 'rat shadows', and swap MLAA to FXAA for optimal smoothness
Skyrim: - Not even funny. Spend 20 min standing atop a mountain looking down at the valley. Beautiful.
Witcher 2: MUCH better than I had been able to play before: went from a 1280x res to 1920x, but some high-end settings still make it stutter. Dont know what kind of best this game needs...
Funnily Deadlight seems to provide a challenge... Not that many graphic options, but still have occasional stutter.
Gave LA Noire a go - it doesn't even seem to be the same game I played before. Might even run through it again once I'm done with Dishonoured.
Mass Effect 3 seems very much improved also. But I'll defer further playing until after I've gotten a decent save from my old machine with all the achievements.
Sleeping Dogs: Looks beautiful with the lights and reflections on cars, and steel/glass buildings. However, had some stutter even on 'Medium' settings. Not sure if the limitation is elsewhere, or is a console port issue.
Looking forward to trying ACIII.

Overall very happy with it. The girlfriend threatens to leave me. I've beaten Sleeping dogs and XCOM in the past 10 days...

[LeftEyeNine]

I have i7 processor of the same generation coupled with less RAM and a GTX 675M (as far as I've heard, it's refurbished GTX 580M) and, for example, Witcher 2 is playable at highest settings where only über-sampling is disabled.

Sleeping Dogs have the highest settings pumped in, maybe some degrees lowered in AA, that's all and it's playing well too.

I suspect your power management profile is restraining your rig to perform at its peak. You have to check those settings and choose the one that requires most power, hence yielding the highest performance.

Happy gaming with your monsta.

[SwordsMaster]

Hmmm, I'll check again, but it was set to 'performance' when I set it up the first time... Anything else? Any useless windows/antivirus stuff I can turn off? I'm using AVG free at the moment, and Sleeping dogs crashed a couple of times because I had to approve it for AVG...

Any recommendations on snagging up those extra crumbs of processing power?

[LeftEyeNine]

AVG is hardly considered a reputable antivirus solution these days -whereas "these days" have been spanning over for a couple of years now.

Bitdefender and KAV have gamer modes you expect to be enabled automatically or you could manually. I'm using Bitdefender as we speak. MSE has been left out of options after having seen that its detection rate is quite low to leave you vulnerable. Check this independent tester websites about AVs and decide on the one that would keep you clean and would inflict the least impact on your system : http://www.av-comparatives.org and http://www.av-test.org/en/home/

Razer Game Booster is a capable utility, although being in beta, that claims to be smartly removing load off your system when you launch a game. Although their effectiveness is disputable, it wouldn't hurt to give a try. Request for an open-beta here.

[SwordsMaster]

Thanks for the suggestions, LEN. Are there any good free AVs? Any other recommendations for keeping bloatware, malware, etc under control?

[Lemur]

I've been browsing happily with a combination of MSE and SuperAntiSpyware. I also keep an install of Malwarebytes for if/when things go kabloom. Works for me.