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ASUS G2P First Impressions October 31, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With their G2P notebook, ASUS has their sights set on the gaming notebook market. The system supports the latest Core 2 Duo CPUs, an 8ms LCD display, and ATI Mobility Radeon X1700 graphics. Read our first impressions of this system in today's article!
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ASUS even has a notebook made from carbon fiber!
With all this success however, ASUS has never really designed a notebook that was targeted at gamers. Sure, ASUS has produced quite a few notebooks with features that would appeal to gamers, such as high-speed hard drives and discrete GPUs from both ATI and NVIDIA, but they’ve never really produced a notebook that was designed to appeal to gamers from the ground up. All that is about to change with ASUS’ G2 series.
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As the “G” in G2 implies, this is ASUS’ first true gaming notebook. One ASUS sales document we perused dubs this notebook as their “extreme gaming station”, and when the system loads up the BIOS initialization has been replaced by a sequence depicting an explosion followed by the words: “ASUS Gaming Series”. The G2P supports Intel’s latest Merom Core 2 CPUs, including the Core 2 Duo T7600, and is powered by Intel’s 945PM chipset with Centrino technology. Graphics duties are handled by ATI’s Mobility Radeon X1700, which ASUS equips with 512MB of DDR2 video RAM. Hard drive capacities of 80/100/120/160GB are supported, with up to 2GB of DDR2-667 system memory and the system is equipped with a SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro card reader and 1.3 megapixel webcam (a TV tuner is also available as an optional upgrade).
If all that weren’t enough, the real sweet part of the G2P is its display. The G2P is outfitted with a 17.1” WXGA+ 1440x900 500-nits display with an 8ms response time and ASUS’ Crystal Shine technology. It’s an In-Plane Switching (IPS) TFT LCD, so you can easily read the display at extreme viewing angles: the “sweet spot” is massive on this notebook!
A really nice display isn’t the only feature that distinguishes the G2P from the pack. ASUS has also built in their Direct Console feature, which consists of Direct Messenger and Direct Flash.
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Direct Messenger refers to the status display in the top left corner of the notebook’s chassis. Direct Messenger displays current time, and has a battery indicator that will shine when you have 10% or less battery power remaining. When not in use, the display reads: “ASUS”.
Direct Messenger is also compatible with MS Outlook and MSN, an email icon will light up when you receive new mail, or a bell will shine when you’ve got an important meeting (scheduled in Outlook) coming up. ASUS even mentions a caller ID feature if via their Power4Phone feature, but we haven’t seen this yet.
Direct Messenger is also customizable. You can tweak the display messages and icons if you’d like.
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With Direct Flash, the system will literally light up when playing DirectX games. On each side of the G2P’s display is a large LED display, in the case of our system, the LEDs were red. These LEDs flash intermittently during gaming. Fortunately, the LEDs aren’t too bright, but if you do find this distracting, this feature, as well as Direct Messenger can both be turned off.
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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.
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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.
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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…