I own the 725-074US and have had NO problems with overheating, even running turbo mode w/an 82F or so room temp.
Also your Vantage scores seem to be quite low, as I've seen the -075 equivalents (P9500) break 11k, although the difference may be explained away, I suppose, by the only 2GHz core clock rate of the quad part, which is why the quad option was just never enticing to me for the quad mobile CPU that they offered.
Turbo mode for the -075US and equivalent models pushes it up to c. 3.1GHz IIRC, and c. 2.8GHz for my model. This appears to be a FSB bump to achieve the overclock. I don't use it myself as I prefer not to stress what must already be a somewhat stressed system, a notebook.
Stalker SoC runs smoothly for me, although I don't have clear sky yet and have little interest in Crysis or Far Cry 2, but on the notebookreview forums -075US equivalent owners indicate that it is possible to play smoothly at native res 1920x1200 with slightly reduced quality options, plus driver and other tweaking. (There's a GIGANTIC GT725 owners thread there BTW including all sorts of info including one user tweaking his 4850 BIOS to near desktop speeds, although his temp sensor seems to be broken as it ALWAYS reports abnormally low temps.)
Other games, Oblivious, "Fallout" 3, Two Worlds, Civ IV, UFO series, UFO Extraterrestrials, NWN2, Drakensang, HL2, TF2, TFC, and many other games run fine at 1680x1050 (where applicable) with no tweaking and very high settings if not max.
Build quality of the GT725/1722 is MUCH better than the 625/1651.
Bad things:
mystery BIOS updates from MSI (no sign of a changelog)
protruding battery (worth it for 2.5h run time which is what I get in turbo batt mode + 50-60% backlight which looks like undervolting to me)
keyboard layout makes FPS gaming tricky, plus I'd really suggest a USB keyboard for such games as the keyboard isn't exactly the strongest but adequate for most gaming situations excepting those where you might unintentionally stress the kb more than "normal"
screen bleed at the bottom of the LCD panels seems to be quite common and is evident on mine(a Samsung LCD part) making it useless for graphics designers or so I've been told. I don't notice it unless I look for it, or look at just the right angle.
Colors seem to be a bit off sometimes for video, but I blame the catalyst drivers.
Catalyst drivers are OLDER than dirt, as you're stuck with MSI drivers as the generic ATI ones will NOT install w/o some tweaking or you can google dontargue.
the 1680x1050 models all seem to be shiny panels, which I terribly dislike. (Oh look! I can see my hands in the screen while typing! How wonderful!)
Ships with 4GB DDR2-800 DRAM, but is set lower in BIOS(600 IIRC). Likely because Turbo mode kicks the memory up to around 800 when enabled, although setting the memory to 800 still seems to work OK with Turbo mode although note that I VERY rarely enable it.
wrt above ships with 32b Vista?! -> ~3GB available DRAM to vista
Might have to do old fashioned linux text install and some manual config as the OSS drivers don't really support RV770 well. (I had to use alt install disk for Ubuntu and manually config networking(blast from the ancient past) to get catalyst drivers and, therefore, X.org up and running on it. 9.04 may just work now, but I just did a dist upgrade myself. Not sure about other distros as Ubuntu's been good enough to me so far, although I'm starting to get that distro switch itch again.
Tomshardware notebook reviews leave a great deal to be desired, although this seems to be endemic to all hardware site in which they are VERY good at reviewing desktop systems, build, parts, CPUs, etc. yet flounder around with producing meaningful notebook reviews. (notebookreviews is the only place that I've found w/halfway decent notebook reviews plus they have the BEST notebook forums.)
Oh yes, I've had my 725 since the beginning of March, ordered from newegg and barring the above it's been a very good experience.
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