you might want to look into who is building the msi (microstar international) laptops. from the layout, they look like Acer's (which suck) but, they could be coming from the same plant as the Asus. if you're going to play iracing on it, you're going to want the biggest cpu and as much gpu power as a laptop can have, even then, maxed out may not be possible just due to the architecture of laptops.
looking at the specs on both units, the $1300 unit should end up giving you better gaming performance due to core processor speed and gpu specs.