ASUS G2P

It's a gaming laptop. "Gaming on the go". Ho ho ho.

The ASUS G2 notebook is a bit of a monster. Styled in retro-futuristic red and carbon fibre black with an aluminium finish lid, it gives the feeling of a dreadnaught, poised to take on the likes of Dell’s XPS M1710. The evil red glowing eye beneath the touchpad’s buttons enhances this and, if it could talk, probably wouldn’t actually say much of anything to add to its menacing countenance.

Things start well, being equipped with a Core 2 Duo T7200 and 2GB of 667MHz DDR2. It’s also the first Vista notebook to sit squarely on our laps, with the 120GB hard drive handily partitioned into a 64GB system and 43GB data drive. Yes, we’re well aware that doesn’t add up to 120GB – a downside of formatted size versus non-formatted, or as a certain friend of ours would say: ‘It munches the gigabytes’.

Connectivity wise the G2 is well-equipped, with FireWire, Bluetooth, four USB ports at the back and one on the side. There’s also a limited set of memory card slots for the photography pundits, covering MMC, SD and MS/Pro. Below this is an ExpressCard slot, behind a physical switch for turning wireless on and off. There’s even an IR receiver should you have a remote handy.

BIOS options as expected are quite limited – you won’t be overclocking through hardware on this machine. It can get occasionally noisy as it vents hot air, but nothing that’s annoying or beyond normal notebook volume.

The WASD keys are handily highlighted in red, and as a bit of a gimmick the red lights on the side flash like a Christmas tree whenever a DirectX application is loaded (read: games), something that can thankfully be turned off.

As for power consumption, a button gives you quick access to four profiles, so you can save your battery when you’re not fragging.

The ALPS touchpad and software is decent, yet despite plenty of configuring, updating software and attempting to perfect our stroking technique (snigger), we could never get the vertical scroll to work first time, every time. Occasionally, left clicking on a dialogue box would make it lose focus, as if we’d clicked on the desktop instead of an ‘OK’ button – we assume this to be an odd Vista bug that will no doubt be resolved shortly.

In light of the scrolling issue we’d recommend a standalone mouse, and thankfully ASUS includes a rebranded Logitech MX518 to do the job. Also in the package is a rugged and well-designed backpack to store the laptop and other random stuff of your choosing.

The 17” screen is nice as well, even if the resolution is limited to 1440 x 900. ASUS tells us this was the only way it could reach the 2ms quoted response time – and indeed, movement looks great on this intergalactic space cruiser masquerading as a notebook.

In fact it seems the G2 has everything going for it really, until it comes to what it’s actually built for – video gaming.

This is down to one reason – the Mobility Radeon X1700 is an underpowered weakling in the notebook world, making us question its inclusion. While AMD’s page lists an X1800 and X1900 Mobility (and an X2300!), it seems these chips are not available yet. So why didn’t ASUS go with NVIDIA for more power? The lower-end 15.4” ASUS G1 certainly did, choosing the GeForce Go 7700 – for all intents and purposes a slightly better performing GPU. Dell’s XPS M1710 on the other hand lets you load up a GeForce Go 7950GTX – admittedly at a significantly higher price, but at least the option is there.

We’re not sure how ASUS would go about implementing a choice of graphics chip, but the chosen accelerator is steadfastly mediocre for a gaming solution – just look at how it stacks up against a year-old Dell configuration, a similar setup now costing slightly more than ASUS’ offering.

When it comes down to it the G2P has all the makings of a brilliant gaming notebook, the package is excellent and it’s good value – it just stumbles at the final and most important hurdle.

Asus G2P
3DMark06, 1280 x 1024, No AA, 8xAF (3DMarks)	2060
Super Pi Mod (4M, time)	2:30.566
HDTach Burst Speed (MB/s)	132.2
HDTach Average Read (MB/s)	34.9
Half-Life 2, 1440 x 900, 4xAA, 8xAF (fps)	30.63

Dell XPS 1710
3DMark06, 1280 x 1024, No AA, 8xAF (3DMarks)	3274
Super Pi Mod (4M, time)	2:33.921
HDTach Burst Speed (MB/s)	109.2
HDTach Average Read (MB/s)	42
Half-Life 2, 1600 x 1200, 4xAA, 8xAF (fps)	62.74