We just got our hands on one of ASUS’s newest gaming notebooks, the $1,699 ASUS G50V, the successor to the original G1. The notebook has a unique orange coloring, LED display, and blue accent lights: it definitely screams gaming notebook, so we took it for a test run.

Bundled Accessories
First off, the G50V comes packaged with its own backpack and Logitech M158x gaming mouse, which is a good addition considering most fragheads don’t use the trackpad while gaming.

Under the Hood
The G50V has plenty of power under the hood, including mid-range NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT discrete graphics, and Intel’s Centrino 2 platform with a 2.54GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400. There’s also 4GB of RAM, and two 320GB 5,400rpm hard drives for a total of 640GB of storage. While our system came with a DVD burner, a Blu-ray option is available as well.

Unique Features
You can display system resources, including available memory and CPU task percentage, on the small LCD that sits above the keyboard. More fun, was the ability to display a custom message. In our case: “Todd Rulez the School.” There’s also the option to turn on an e-mail indicator icon if you’re running Microsoft Outlook, and support for MSN messenger alerts.

The notebook also supports facial recognition for logging in to Windows, but we haven’t tested that yet.

There are four soft touch buttons along the top of the keyboard, one for launching the ASUS console for overclocking, changing the lights, and customizing the messages. The second button will launch Windows Media Center in Windows, or ASUS’s Express Gate quick boot operating system which boots in 8 seconds and allows you to do the basics, like chat, surf the Web, or use Skype. The third button switches between three power performance profiles to change your battery life. The final button toggles the touchpad on and off.

Keyboard
The keyboard is large, and there’s a small number pad on the right side as well. However, we noticed already that the keys take a bit more force than we’re used to. While typing up a different review on the notebook yesterday, we noticed that it didn’t always recognize every letter. Hopefully this is a non-issue after a few more days of use.

Gaming
Crysis recommends playing with the graphics on low, but you can get away with turning up the juice a bit. We were able to maintain a playable 19 frames per second with the graphics set to a low 1024 x 768 resolution and on Medium. When we bumped the graphics up to the native 16801050, we saw 16 frames per second on average.

The game was playable, but the graphics weren’t as sharp as they could have been and firefights were a bit laggy. Not bad considering this is targeted towards the enthusiast gamer market, and not so much the hardcore gamer, who would probably prefer the much more expensive Alienware m17x or ASUS’s’ own G70s.

For an added boost, you can toggle the machine into Turbo mode, where it overclocks the processor. On the other hand, the Gateway P-7811FX, which costs just $1,399, was able to deliver 21 frames per second with the graphics on High and the resolution set to a low 1024 x 768. But it has NVIDIA’s last generation GeForce 8800M GTS instead.

Performance
In our initial tests, the Asus G50V A1 scored on-par with the desktop replacement gaming machine average. Its 3DMark03 score of 18,832 beat out the 12,797 average, and its score of 5662 in 3DMark06 was just a hair better than the 5,219 average. But this doesn’t compare to the Gateway P-7811FX’s score of 8,679 in the same test. It fared well with a score off 3,148 in PCMark Vantage, where others raked in an average of 3304.

We’re excited to see how this system performs in Call of Duty 4 also, and will revisit it in our full review. Stay tuned.

Check out our hands-on video below.

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