Centrino 2 Laptop Roundup

ASUS G50V - Specifications and Summary

Most of the components in the G50V are near the top of what is presently available. The T9400 processor is only one notch down from the X9000, and the built-in overclocking allows you to run at up to 2.86 GHz by manipulating the front side bus. Truthfully, the P8400 (or at most P8600) is sufficient for all but the most extreme users and would cost quite a bit less, or four bit more money you could get the P9500 that has a lower power requirement but the same performance as the T9400. It's also a little odd that ASUS chose to include two 250GB 5400 RPM hard drives on what is supposedly a desktop replacement system. Battery life as we will see in a moment is nothing special, and it would have been nice to get a bit more performance from 7200 RPM drives - or more storage from 5400 RPM drives. Note that the hard drives are not in a RAID 0 configuration; we prefer this approach, as dealing with RAID 0 - particularly on notebooks - can be frustrating and the performance benefits are usually negligible.

One component that you can't upgrade that we have an issue with is the keyboard. Specifically, we don't like what ASUS did with the number keypad. It's nice to have that keypad over there, but we tend to use the page down, page up, home, and end keys on a regular basis. Unfortunately, you don't get direct access to any of those keys when numlock is on, so we actually prefer either doing away with the number keypad and putting a column with the missing keys on the right side, or else they just need to figure out a different arrangement in order to provide dedicated keys. The HP d5vt takes the latter approach while the Gateway P-7811 uses the former; either one is preferable to the keyboard on the G50V in our opinion. Other than that snafu, the keyboard works fine, but even after a couple weeks of use we still found ourselves having to pause a minute to find the home/end/page up/page down keys.

We have very few complaints with the rest of the component choices. You get a nice LCD, Intel 5100 802.11N wireless, 4GB of memory, and a 64-bit operating system. The GeForce 9700M GT is still a step down in performance relative to the 9800M options, but it's at least a viable midrange solution capable of running most games at 1280x800 at high detail settings. We do wish that ASUS would have gone with the 9700M GTS or one of the 9800M options, however. Speaking of which....

ASUS has a very large selection of current laptops, and it's not unusual to see various models come and go with minor updates. We understand that the G50V-A1 we are reviewing should be available through the end of 2008, but other models will use the same basic design and change some of the components. One example is the G50V-X1, which downgrades the CPU and hard drive selections and shaves off over $200 from the price tag. Perhaps a far more interesting variant of the G50V is the G50Vt that is being sold exclusively through Best Buy.

Priced at $1250, it has a downgraded CPU and hard drive relative to the G50V-A1 we are reviewing; it also comes with a 15.6" 1366x768 LCD instead of the 15.4" WSXGA+ (1680x1050) panel, which is an unfortunate change. Furthermore, the one-year warranty comes from Best Buy rather than a two-year ASUS warranty. That's a lot of negatives, but besides the lower price there's one major positive: it includes a GeForce 9800M GTS instead of the 9700M GT, so in terms of gaming performance it should be at least 50% faster and will go head-to-head with the Gateway P-7811. That card is quite a bit faster than the 9700M GT since it has twice the memory bandwidth and twice as many SPs.)

The ASUS G50V strikes an interesting middle ground between "gaming" laptops that use 8600M/9600M graphics chips and the 8800M/9800M offerings. It's a bit odd that the fastest version of the G50V to date also has the lowest resolution LCD, but regardless there's still plenty to like with the G50V. It's a heavier notebook, almost as large as most 17" offerings, but the features, build quality, warranty, and accessories add up to a very good overall package. In a straight up performance shootout between the Gateway P-7811 FX and the ASUS G50V, we would take the Gateway system every time. However, we have received quite a few emails from users that purchased the P-7811 who had stability/reliability problems. The G50Vt should close the performance gap, but Gateway still has a decent WUXGA display that easily trumps a 1366x768 panel. What we'd really like to see is a modified version of the G50Vt with dual hard drives and a WSXGA+ LCD price between $1400 and $1500.