Page 2

The chassis

The chassis ASUS has come up with for the G2P is certainly distinctive. The system is mainly composed of plastic, but it’s quite rugged, definitely not the garden-variety plastic you see on your typical notebook. For added flair, ASUS uses brushed aluminum on the front edge of the notebook, just below the touchpad. Here you’ll also find quick launch buttons for media playback, say for instance, watching DVDs on the PC.

Moving to the back of the system, you’ll find both DVI and VGA outputs as well as an S-Video out. Hot air from the system exhausts out the vent to the left of the S-Video connection, while four USB ports are also located on the back of the system. The G2P sports dimensions of 410.6 x 315.6 x 46.8 mm according to ASUS, and weighs 4.39 kg. It’s surprisingly thin and lightweight for a 17” widescreen notebook, although clearly with its large screen it’s probably a little too large for comfortable use on an airplane (unless you’re flying first class of course).

Gaming-focused keyboard

Since this notebook is intended for gamers, ASUS adds their “gaming-focused” keyboard to the G2P. Frankly it’s a pretty typical notebook keyboard in our opinion, although ASUS highlights the “W”, “A”, “S”, and “D” keys.

We’d honestly rather see ASUS provide a backlit keyboard than the highlighted keys and Direct Flash, as the highlighted keys are actually slightly harder to read since they have black rather than white lettering, but oh well.

Just above the keyboard are quick launch keys for applications such as Outlook (email) and the Internet, while ASUS has integrated speakers to the left and right sides of the system’s keyboard.

Performance

In order to test the performance of the system, we ran a few quick benchmarks with 3DMark 06, Quake, and F.E.A.R., but first, a little on our G2P system.

The notebook was outfitted with a Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU, good for 2.0GHz, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM and a 160GB hard drive. ASUS clocks the notebook’s Mobility Radeon X1700 GPU at 460MHz core/495MHz memory for gaming. 3DMark 06 reported a score of 2088 3DMarks at 1280x768, while performance in Quake 4 and F.E.A.R was 32.4 and 29 frames per second respectively at 1440x900 with no AA/AF applied. We’re hunting for better graphics drivers for the system though.


These are just our preliminary thoughts on the ASUS G2P notebook so far, there’s still a lot of testing left for us to do. We don’t have any data on price or availability just yet, so we’ll definitely have to reserve final judgment on the system until then. So far it looks like a nice notebook. Since its limited to the Mobility Radeon X1700 GPU, it won’t give a high-end Alienware or Dell XPS notebook a run for its money in gaming, but it’s not designed to. We’ll push the system a little more in our final review…