Asus G70

Item: Asus G70
Author: Joe Martin

Written by Joe Martin

August 28, 2008 | 06:58

Tags: #8700m #g70 #gaming-laptop #notebook #republic-of-gamers #sli

Companies: #asus

Conclusions

It’s hard to make any really final judgements about the Asus G70 because the entire product is a mix of pros and cons depending on personal tastes. Everything from the overall aesthetic right down to the choice of system components is likely to split opinion fairly soundly.

Take the design for example; with so many lights on the chassis and with the entire look sculpted to look futuristic and powerful, it’s likely that many will find the G70 attractive…but not all and there are several members of the bit-tech staff who find the G70 looks utterly repugnant.

Then once you get inside the system there’s a nice 4GB of system RAM, plus another 1GB made up from the video memory of the two Nvidia 8700M GTs. All well and good, except the operating system is a 32-bit version of Vista so one of those gigabytes of memory is essentially redundant as 32-bit systems are limited to only using four gigabytes total.

Then, in use, the story gets weirder still and you see that the system is heavily weighed down by a bombardment of essentially useless pre-installed pieces of software – enough to turn off anybody who likes a quick boot time and uncomplicated system on delivery.

After that there’s the battery life, something which has never been a strength for gaming laptops in general and which certainly wasn’t a strong point for the Asus G70. The entire laptop runs off of a lithium ion battery with a rating of 5200mAh, which can run the system at idle (with medium screen brightness and wireless and Bluetooth off) for only just over an hour.

One hour and five minutes with no applications other than the system tray filling drivers and so on running is not good, obviously. You wouldn’t be able to properly digest even one of Richard’s mammoth reviews. Worse, if you had to rely on the battery while gaming then you can expect this time to half. Half an hour of gaming before you have to give up and find somewhere to plug in isn’t exactly the most exciting thing about owning a high-end gaming laptop unless you count your attention span in seconds on one hand.

Then there's the Blu-ray drive and either sheer lie or wrongly stuck advertisement on the chassis that the G70 does 1080p Full-HD. Periodically - it does not. 1,440x900 is more than a 720p resolution, but that's not full HD. In fact, 1680x1050 is close, but only 1920x1200 exceeds the Full-HD spec. Do you want to watch Blu-ray movies a sort of a bit more than basic 720p HD? It'll do, but it's not ideal.

To be totally fair though, it does have to be pointed out that the G70 is, like most other gaming laptops, designed to be used more as a desktop replacement than as a notebook for those on the go – in other words the battery is way down the list of important things to tick off. There’s a huge amount of power-hungry hardware inside this aluminium and fake-carbon fibre case and the high performance focus means that even if you are going to be taking it with you somewhere then it’ll probably be to a LAN party or a boardroom. Laptops like this are often used in Web 2.0 presentations and so on.

Finally we come to the one thing that matters most though; the performance and how much of it you’re getting for your money. At it’s base level the performance offered by the G70 appears to be good and it lets you run games like Crysis at the same settings as other, far more expensive laptops like the Kobalt Comanche SLI.

What you don’t see though are the caveats, such as the fact that it does this by having a native resolution which is much lower than those laptops. You also have to balance that against the amount of bloatware and so on which weighs down the system. Then you have to go back and compare the Asus G70 to other laptops which offer pretty much the same look and performance but which are available at a lower cost. Take this Alienware for example.

In the end, the G70 isn’t a bad laptop but it does suffer from being stuck in the middle a little bit. The hardware isn’t really enough to blow your socks off and though the performance is adequate it does carry a few technical compromises. The design is effective, if a little polarising when it comes to eliciting a reaction from customers, but the cost balances this out easily and places the G70 awkwardly in the middle ground of the market where it can tread water in the sea of other gaming laptop, but unfortunately doesn’t have enough Phelps in it to go for gold. Ha, topical!