Asus makes great hardware. I have owned machines previously but am not familiar with the current offering.
Everyone's mileage will vary, but I have owned MSI laptops and have had poor experiences with 2 of them; related to heat and power. My last was an Apache Pro (Nvidia 860M installed) and it is essentially a doorstop now so I would look elsewhere. That machine without going into a ton of detail essentially didn't have a large enough power supply. If it twitched out to the Nvidia GPU, connected via Wi-Fi and was using my blutooth mouse, it would drop the carrier consistently. Connect via ethernet or just use Intel graphics? No problem. I finally figured it out and swapped to an older Wi-Fi card to correct but it also ran so hot it would burn my leg - all in all, a very poor design. The previous MSI was also a lava brick.
I have had really good luck with Acer and currently rock a Predator notebook. Some people think they are kind of wonky-looking, but I love it. I can swap out the Blu_Ray drive and add a fan unit for additional cooling if I want and it was easy to expand the memory and SSD on my own. Super-impressed with this machine and it runs cool. I have owned 4 Acer notebooks and all of them are still in operation. My wife uses a Sandy-bridge era machine (Aspire) as her office machine (Running Unbuntu today) and I given the oldest to a sister, rocking an old AMD Athlon processor (Also running Linux) that she uses to surf the web and check her e-mail on the road. That machine is over a decade old and boots right up. It would be slow as molasses with Windows but the Linux install keeps it relevant.
Good luck in your search!
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