Asus' Republic of Gamers brand has been wowing gamers for years now. Any motherboard, PC or graphics card with its fishy-looking logo has a good stab at providing gaming performance above the norm. The £1,000 Asus G50 gaming laptop -- the latest to sport the logo -- is aimed at those who want to frag with impunity, safe in the knowledge that their gaming experience won't be interrupted by untimely slowdown.
Design
Asus has designed the G50 to grab your attention. The lid, for example, is the shiniest, glossiest, blackest thing since crude oil. We're not exaggerating here; gaze at it for long enough and it's a bit like staring into a lake at night, or directly into Kiera Knightley's eyes.
The black is offset by smatterings of silver, including a couple of shiny strips on the lid, silver caps on the hinge edges, and even more shiny stuff on the Asus logo. The sides of the lid also have some silver strips, which glow blue when the power is switched on.
Slightly more gaudy is the inclusion of a bright metallic tangerine strip at the tip of the lid. Lift the lid and you'll find more tangerine highlights around the keyboard, plus a wealth of blue LED lights -- one framing the mouse trackpad and some highlighting the presence of a strip of shortcut buttons above the keyboard. These, going from left to right, enable the Republic of Gamers mode, start and close Windows Media Center, adjust the performance of the laptop for enhanced battery life or quicker performance, and temporarily disable the mouse trackpad.
You might find yourself using the last of those buttons quite often. We found the mouse trackpad to be a little too far over to the right of the wrist rest -- so far in fact, that users are prone to rubbing the ball of their hands over it. This, understandably, causes accidental mouse clicks, which can be distracting and counterproductive while typing.
The keyboard itself is large and comfortable to use. It even has a dedicated numerical keypad squashed onto the far right. The grid-like layout of these keys can come in handy in games that require diagonal movement, or for people who enter a lot of numerical data into spreadsheets and databases.
Features
When you first power up the G50, it splashes the Republic of Gamers logo up on the screen and plays an explosion sound over the speakers, presumably hinting at the enormous power at your fingertips.
It's a bit dramatic, but we'll forgive the theatrics since the G50 has a solid list of core components. Asus has supplied an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 running at 2.26GHz and a whopping 4GB of RAM, although only 3,056MB of this is recognised due to the architectural limitations of using a 32-bit operating system.
More significant, perhaps, is Asus' choice of graphics card. The G50 uses an Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT, which is faster than most, but below the 9700M GTS, 9800M GT, 9800M GTS and 9800M GTX in the Nvidia rankings. Don't get disheartened by this, it packs a healthy 512MB of dedicated memory and is definitely not shy of a moving a few polygons around.
The G50's display is slightly disappointing. There's not an awful lot wrong with the image quality, but the native resolution on our review sample was a modest 1,366x768 pixels. There are some configurations of the G50 with a 1,680x1,050-pixel display available in other markets (such as Singapore, for instance) but the UK seems to have drawn the short straw in this regard.
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Stevennickel 5 December 2008
Good: Flawlessly runs Crysis.
Bad: ehhh..ermm... ugh.... deh? no remote? xD
Comment: Okay, first of all I think there should be a parody for the review since my laptop barely shares any of the same specifications. I guess I bought a more media centered one- because I have a DVD-RW drive w/ Lightscribe- not a blu-ray, not that i'm complaining... blue ray's overrated.
My machine actually gets about 95 minutes of battery life- not good at all but given the performance i find very acceptable. uh let's see... 4 gigs of ram- yes, PROCESSOR= Intel Core 2 Duo- 2.0 ghz (overclockable to 2.26+)... not advertised as 2.6.
What else? Operating systems... Yea, my Asus g50 came with vista 64bit premium, Windows Media Center, and an Asus Express operating system that you can activate via the touch L.E.Ds with the laptop off. Very cool I think. The hard drive is 200 gb total (2 x 100gb)- not too bad.
I respect the review for what it is- laughed out loud when i read the part about the shiny black top- very exaggerated by the manufacturer, yes, and sexy for approximately 10 seconds after a fresh windex'ing.
The laptop's a beast- just because it's not an XPS doesn't mean it isn't an incredible machine. When overclocked via the touch L.E.D. Republic of Gamers options- to 2.2 ghz, it flawlessly runs Crysis... bragging rights to any laptop these days. My graphics card is actually the GeForce 9700 M GT- not the awesome-est ever but VERY high up the ladder.
Sound card is great- forgive me for not remembering the basics on it but who really cares? it's about as awesome as your external speaker set can be- like always.
Forget that jazz they wrote about the touchpad being too far right. It is... obviously, but not to the extreme they say- only about 1/4 inch of your right thumb is overlapping the pad, and only on the scroll bar portion of the touch pad. It's not so bad, and i've never messed up a page with it accidentally.
The review bashes the screen- i wouldn't know any better- but i can tell you I about jizzed on myself when i ran crysis for the first time and the EA games logo displayed with my surround sound. I find the graphics outstanding. who knows-
The camera's not too great on it... I use it for SKYPE and it's a little grainy, but gets the job done. I'm pretty impressed with the little bit of optical zoom it has for a mounted camera on a laptop- and microphones are great.
OH! it's pretty cool to set your own custom phrases and taglines scrolling across the top of your keyboard as reminders, etc due to the RP.G l.e.d screen up there. That's fun.
Too make a long story come to an abrupt end- the laptops great for the money. You're not going to whine nearly as much as the rich snobs that wrote the review after fondling the higher ranked Dell. This is an incredible machine. And for the record, if you have the 64bit vista like i do, the laptop will find ways to utilize all 4 gb's of ram during extreme gameplay. Great machine.
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