Verdict: The flashy lights don't make this laptop go any faster.
The 1980s have to put up with a lot of undeserved flack; which other decade can boast David Hasselhoff, mullets and Wham? If you loved the 1980s then you'll probably like the styling of the new Asus G2 gaming laptop.
When closed, the G2, with its shiny silver and black lid, looks sleek and modern, but opening the lid feels like going back in time. There are strips of black and red sci-fi grating on either side of the keyboard (sadly, they don't flash or glow) and while the laptop doesn't talk to you in a level-headed, slightly condescending American accent, in all other respects, the G2 is very similar to KITT from 'Knight Rider'. A back-lit red 'eye' below the G2's touchpad is matched in flashiness by two LED light strips on the sides of the lid, which both blink when you fire up a game. There's also 'Direct Messenger', a small monochrome OLED above the keyboard that you can set to display your own custom message, or system information to try and minimise disruption when you're in full-screen gaming mode. Finally, the WASD keys are marked out in red. Much like Alienware's Area 51m or Dell's XPS M1710, Asus certainly doesn't want the G2 to be mistaken for a run-of-the-mill business laptop.
Thankfully, the G2's components and operating system are much more contemporary than the anachronistic styling suggests. This laptop is the first we've seen that sports Windows Vista Home Premium rather than XP. To complement this new OS, the G2 is equipped with a dependable Core 2 Duo T7200; with both of its cores clocked at 2GHz, and a healthy 4MB shared Level 2 cache, it promises to be a potent performer in our benchmarks.
Vista has already gained a well deserved reputation for being memory-hungry, so the G2's single 2GB stick of DDR2 RAM is reassuring, although there's no room for additional memory, as the G2's motherboard has only a single SO-DIMM slot. Still, even with the snazzy AeroGlass theme enabled, Vista was quick to load and looked great. Flicking between applications using 3D Flip was reassuringly responsive.
The most crucial component in a gaming system is, of course, the graphics card. As laptops don't offer upgradable graphics or displays, it's important to perfectly match the graphics with the display's native resolution. The G2 has a crisp 17in 1,440 x 900 widescreen display, which has a glossy reflective coating to enhance colour and contrast. While it's slightly less demanding on the graphics card than the 1,680 x 1,050 or even 1,920 x 1,200 panels found on high-end gaming laptops, such as the Rock Xtreme CTX, this screen will require a decent mid-range graphics card in order for new games such as Command & Conquer 3 and Need for Speed: Carbon to look good and play smoothly. We weren't quite sure that the aging 512MB Mobility Radeon X1700 in the G2, therefore, would be up to the task. It's basically a clock-tweaked Radeon X1600, so it has only 12 pixel processors - half the number of the mediocre Radeon X1650XT, the card that finished at the bottom of last month's mid-range graphics Labs test.
There's just a single USB 2 port on the left-hand side of the G2, but an additional four USB 2 ports are situated around the back. The laptop has many extras, including an Asus G2 branded version of Logitech's classic MX518 gaming mouse. It has the same comfortable shape as that of the Logitech G5, although it lacks some of the bells and whistles, such as adjustable weights. Asus has added both 802.11b/g WiFi and Bluetooth for those who like their wireless gadgets, and there's a built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam above the screen, plus an external FM/digital TV for watching TV on the move, so Vista Home Premium's built-in Media Centre software won't go to waste. To hold all your games and saved TV programmes, a 160GB Seagate hard drive provides a decent amount of storage space, although the 5,400rpm spin rate could do with being a little quicker for our taste.
PERFORMANCE
Unless you want to strap it to the dashboard of a black Pontiac and chase bad guys, the styling of the G2 pretty much rules out any use for it other than gaming, so we were expecting it to be very good in this respect.
Unfortunately, the G2 was pretty rubbish when it came to playing games. We fired up Need for Speed: Carbon at 1,440 x 900 with 2x AA and AF on, and were treated to a stutterfest as the frame rate struggled to reach double figures. It was obvious that AA and AF were out of the question but, even with these disabled, the average frame rate was still only 10fps and the minimum a woeful 7fps. Needless to say, such a poor frame rate meant that our souped-up Renault Clio had the handling of a wheelbarrow made from granite. This situation wasn't helped when we dropped the resolution to 1,280 x 1,024, so it's obvious that the complex shader effects of Carbon are way out of the Mobility Radeon X1700's league.
As an RTS, Command & Conquer 3 doesn't quite demand the smooth frame rates required by a racing game but, even with this in mind, the G2's average frame rate of 12fps at 1,440 x 900 without any AA made the game a frustrating experience. Stuttery scrolling and slow unit movement combined to make it nigh on impossible to effectively control an army, or have any fun.
The G2's 2D performance was much more impressive than its gaming abilities. At 2GHz, the T7200 may not be the fastest mobile Core 2 Duo chip that you can buy - that honour goes to the 2.33GHz T7600 - but it's no slowcoach. The G2's most impressive score was achieved in our Paint Shop Pro test, in which its 2GB of RAM gave it a significant advantage. The G2's score of 1.27 is identical to the score of the Rock Extreme CTX, a laptop equipped with the faster 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo but only 1GB of RAM.
CONCLUSION
The G2 is certainly a promising package, and we like the fact that it includes a USB mouse, Vista, TV tuner and its own rucksack. However, the G2 ultimately fails in the most important aspect of its design: it simply isn't powerful enough to play modern games at its display's native resolution, unless you don't mind butchering the detail levels. At £1,600, such a failing is very hard to forgive.
