Asus G2P 17″ Core 2 Duo Gaming Notebook Review

Impressions and Conclusions

The Asus G2 for the most part was a great notebook to test, however through our regular testing we ran into a few disconcerting crashes.

This is a blue screen that occured three times during wireless testing. The system would freeze on this screen and the G2 requires a hard reset in order to recompose itself. That pink square you see appears every time… it almost looks like a video RAM problem, but seems unrelated to the Wireless tests we were running at time of the crash.

The difficulty in upgrading the RAM is the biggest problem with the Asus G2, and because this notebook is dedicated to gamers I see this as a major lapse on Asus’ part. Of course it’s not impossible to upgrade the RAM (as we’ve documented before for the A7J), but the user shouldn’t have to disassemble their screen and remove their keyboard to get more RAM into their system.

The flashing red lights during DirectX games is interesting, but it would have been better if Asus left these lights on all the time rather than flicker them during games. The OLED display is a great little feature since displaying a clock is something practical anyone can use, but I wish they took it a step further by linking it up to email notifications or RSS feeds from the web.

Asus got things right with the G2 by picking a good hardware platform for a gaming system – the LCD screen is really sharp and vivid, and the speakers are some of the best I’ve heard on a notebook. The X1700 1024MB ATI GPU gives you decent improvement over the X1600 in most games, but it’s still far from being a graphics solution which you can run at high resolutions with high details. I found that the X1700 on the G2 works best with moderate settings at 1024×768 to 1280×900 screen resolutions.

In the end, I think the Asus G2 is a good gaming product for the mid-range market. It doesn’t break the bank like your typical SLI notebook and provides some decent game performance. The Asus G2 is a well rounded product offering a excellent balance of price, CPU performance, gaming ability, and slick style. However, if you’re really serious about gaming I would suggest researching other models as they may prove to offer more gaming bang for the buck.

For all your comparative browsing at your finger tips, be sure to check out our PriceGrabber service to compare the Asus G2 to other similarly configured and priced products.