Verdict: Asus takes on Alienware with a compact gaming laptop
As in the animal kingdom, size is also an advantage in computing. Smaller IT hardware companies have limited options compared with bigger beasts. Ageia is finding it hard to compete with Nvidia, AMD and Intel when it comes to attracting support for its physics hardware. However, the gulf between whales and minnows is never clearer than when it comes to laptops. Huge companies such as Sony and Apple can create gorgeous custom chassis for their mobile creations, whereas smaller outfits such as Rock have to make do with customising off-the-shelf cases. All the more painful is the fact that the physical design of a laptop is crucial; unlike a desktop, when using a laptop, you're in direct contact with the machine.
As you've probably worked out from the number of the company's products we've reviewed in recent issues, Asus is a company on a mission, and it's big enough to compete with the big American and Japanese companies when it comes to designing its own laptops. For its gaming laptops, Asus has taken one of its own stock designs, yet managed to transform it into a very distinctive machine, forgoing the sleekness Apple and Sony usually aim for, and embracing an overtly technical chunkiness, with exposed bolts and carbon fibre-effect plastic. When we reviewed the massive G2 last month, we weren't overly impressed by it - the size of the unit and some of the details looked a little too 1980s - but the more compact G1 wears the styling more comfortably.
The G2 partnered a 17in screen with a lacklustre Mobility Radeon X1700 GPU, making it something of a panda bear - big, but rather too gentle for its own good. The G1 is more predatory, with a 15.4in widescreen panel and Nvidia GeForce Go 7700 graphics. Our review sample was equipped with a screen with a 1,280 x 800 resolution, but there are two versions of the G1, the second of which has a 1,680 x 1,050 screen.
However, the screen isn't one of the best aspects of the G1; Asus has applied a Sony X-black-style coating to increase the contrast and, while it does this, it also means that the sceen is incredibly reflective. Throw in the terrible vertical viewing angles and mediocre horizontal angles, and you have a screen that needs to be viewed head on to obtain the best image quality. That said, as the G1 is a 15.4in laptop, you probably won't use it to entertain large groups of people all that often. The screen also isn't as bright as some modern LCDs we've seen. This may not be a problem now, as you can jack the brightness up to maximum, but given that backlights fade over time, we would have liked to see a little headroom.
While it's great that Asus can custom-manufacture its own chassis, more attention should have been paid to ergonomics. The keyboard is fine, but the recessed trackpad isn't pleasant to use - it's too short and the buttons aren't very responsive. Fortunately, Asus packages an absolutely great bundle with the G1, including a comfy G1-specific rucksack and a Logitech MX518 gaming mouse. The MX518 has been customised with the same carbon-fibre-effect plastic as is used on the laptop, so matches it neatly, and while it lacks the bells and whistles of Logitech's newer mice, it's very responsive and comfortable to use. The rucksack is excellent too; it sports surprisingly subtle looks, and it's well designed, with a padded pocket for the laptop and plenty of storage for peripherals, a power supply, books, pens, and other bits and pieces. Given that the G1 weighs just a shade over 3kg, it's a pretty portable package too.
While the G1 is smaller than the G2, it retains many of the same features, both externally and internally. The Asus Direct Messenger, a small, bright blue integrated OLED panel above the function keys is present, as are the side LED lamps - fortunately, you can turn these off. The WASD keys are highlighted again, and the Asus 'gamer eye' logo, complete with LED, is back too. Inside our review sample was the same powerful CPU, an Intel Core 2 Duo T7200, clocked at 2GHz, and backed up by 2GB of PC2-5300 memory. It's a Centrino machine, so it has the Intel 945PM chipset, along with Intel 802.11b/g WiFi and Bluetooth.
The GPU is the Nvidia GeForce Go 7700, which has 512MB of its own GDDR3 memory clocked at 400MHz (800MHz effective), although it can also borrow as much as 256MB of system memory. The Go 7700 is an 80nm chip and runs at 450MHz. It features 12 pixel pipelines, four more than the Go 7600 but still some way behind the top-of-the-range GeForce Go 7950 GTX sported by Rock laptops. The G1's hard disk is the same capacious 5,400rpm 160GB Seagate model used in the G2, which uses perpendicular storage to boost its capacity. There's also an LG DVD burner that can write dual-layer DVD+R discs, albeit only at 2.4x speed.
The G1 is pre-installed with Windows Vista Ultimate, and as these laptops are proving so popular, Asus had to scour the whole of Europe to find us a review sample. As a result, our sample speaks German. 'Netzwerk' is fairly easy to spot, but other options proved trickier to hunt down - enabling a second screen took ages, for example. Thankfully, the model you buy will be in English, so you won't have to contend with these issues!
When you first turn on the G1, it boots Vista fairly quickly, but takes a long time to settle down, with the hard disk activity light flickering away. There's a lot of system tray software - an app to control the OLED screen, Asus Update, one for the Bluetooth and so on - but even so, we were surprised that a machine with 2GB of memory spent this long thinking about things. When it came to installing games, the story was very similar; installation processes seemed to take forever, with the progress bar slowly inching along, and when it came to installing Vista updates, we had plenty of time to study the strange German notices while the disk chattered to itself. As James has found out during this month's hard disk Labs test, while perpendicular storage allows for bigger capacity drives, there are some performance downsides.
The G1's benchmark scores were similar to those of a system using a desktop Core 2 Duo E6300; at 1.86GHz, this is slower than the G1's 2GHz CPU, although it has a faster FSB (266MHz, 1,066MHz effective). In the multitasking test, as you'd expect from a machine that shares the same specifications as the G2, the G1 scored 1.42.
When it came to gaming, once the pain of the installation process was over, the G1 proved to be a well-balanced system. We fired up Need for Speed: Most Wanted, after visiting www.widescreengamingforums.com for a widescreen hack to get the game running at the G1's 1,280 x 800 resolution. In the game, we found that provided we dropped anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, we could quite happily have all other detail settings turned to maximum and never see the frame rate drop below the mid-20s, making for a perfectly fun experience. The more demanding Need for Speed: Carbon proved to be a tougher test, especially as it isn't fully compatible with Vista; it won't run unless you delete the Movies folder, and even then, it was prone to crashing, which explains why the minimum frame rate was 0fps. Still, Carbon is nowhere near as much fun as Most Wanted, so you aren't missing anything. We benchmarked Company of Heroes at 1,280 x 800 with all the options set to high, and the average frame rate was a good 44fps; although it dived to 17fps in a skirmish battle, we found the game smooth enough to enjoy.
If you can't find a widescreen patch or hack to run a game at 1,280 x 800, the maximum resolution that the screen supports will be 1,024 x 768. What's clear, however, is that the 1,280 x 800 panel is well suited to the power of the GeForce Go 7700 GPU. If you opt for the G1 with the higher-resolution screen, the Go 7700 GPU will definitely lack the power to properly game at 1,680 x 1,050, and you'll end up massacring the detail options in games to keep things moving at a smooth frame rate. Unlike some gaming laptops, the G1 remained quiet during use and pleasantly cool too.
Zusammenfassung
The G1 is a much better designed laptop than the G2, but it isn't quite a perfectly honed game killing machine. The GeForce Go 7700 is fairly well matched with the 1,280 x 800 screen, and the 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 chip and 2GB of memory means that the G1 has plenty of power in apps. It's well priced too, and the hard disk is huge.
The main problems are the super-shiny screen and some annoyances with the case, although these don't spoil what is an otherwise excellent laptop. Avoid the 1,680 x 1,050 model if you want to game though.
