ASUS G50V Preview, Photos and Benchmarks

Hm... do we have any battery life on this yet?

 

To the Indian guy, you will also have to pay a sales tax of anywhere from 5% to 8.75% depending on what state your friend purchases it at.
No real concrete battery info yet, I'll let you know when I get my A1 tomorrow.

 

Best Buys version is a Best Buy exclusive. Its the only one with 15.6" 16x9 screen

 

Does the G50 has the same keyboard like the M50 and M51 have?

So I can replace the G50 keyboard with an M50/51 one, right? Will it fit into the notebook?

 

I think a 16:9 screen is a downgrade honestly. Most of what your doing is web browsing and things, and you need vertical real estate more than horizontal. The 16:9 is mostly only good for movies and I for one do not watch many movies on my laptop.

Now the actual screen used on the BB model is the suck, not because of the 16:9 format but just because of the low resolution. You can fit every single pixel the BB screen can produce in the A1/B1 model with much more to spare.

That said my monitor at home is a 1920x1080 16:9 screen and I love it. Great for movies and games but its also 37" big so you get the real movie effect and it consumes your perifial vision when gaming so you get immersed into the game. TV's and Big Monitors 16:9 = OK, small laptop screens? I think its a step back.

The other thing to keep in mind especially if your an old school gamer is lack of widescreen support. Next time you go to get a fix of Starcraft to hold you off until SC2 comes out and you remember it only supports 4:3 like most other games from the ages and even still many games of today that means bigger black bars on the side and a smaller picture for you to see as compared to what you would have had on a 16:10 laptop screen. Since its already small to start this can be a big eye strain and looks horrible. Still its better than the alternative that many take... to let it stretch and fill the screen. I cant stand a 4:3 --> 16:10 stretch but a 4:3 --> 16:9 would be even worse. Its bad enough to make anorexic super models look like mac donalds models.

 

Dude, I love your freakin' posts. Semper Fi right! That post really help put it in perspective for me with the screen though, heh. I do happen to dabble in the old school SC from time to time. All of the things Ive read in this thread make me totally confident about throwing myself in to debt for one of these things asap!

What are your thoughts on the possibility of a 128Gb Solid State HDD, as offered by the folks at LynnBay if I remember correctly? Worth it? And you can RAID-1/0 the two drives this thing apparently comes with, right?

EDIT: Oh yeah, and XoticPC there is offering XP Home/Pro apparently. That would be sweet, but would get the max potential out of this thing with that OS? Ive contemplated admitting defeat to the wiles of Microsoft and accepting that I will have to use Vista some day, and I'm not sure, but isnt Vista now in the position to make the most use of 64bit computing capabilities? Is there more to Vista that makes it worth bearing for now?

 

Yeah the A1 has 2x 250gb 540rpm drives while the b1 had 2x 200gb 7200rpm drives the chipset allows native support for raid 0 or raid 1.

I would stay away from SSD's for quite some time to come there price is outrageous compared to very little if any performance increases.

Not all SSD's are created equal, if its cheap there is probably a reason why. One guy had this huge rant on how his SSD was slower than his old HDD and he thought SSD was supposed to be super fast, well true but usually only the super expensive ones. Considering your talking half the cost of the laptop for a good 64gb SSD I say F' that.

Also do some research on raid and real life performance gains, dont be fooled by benchmarks. Raid 0 always looks twice as fast as a single drive on a synthetic bench but in real life its often not faster at all or can be even slower depending on what kind of files your handling. Its really only good for very large single continuous file work like video editing. I think when I get my G50 (might be here tomorrow!) I will setup raid 0 just so I can create a guide on how to do it and because I actually do some video work now and then.

Raid 1 is great, if one of your hard drives fails the other drive has a mirror of it all so you wont lose you data, but that means you lose half your disk space. So up to you if you need that data redundancy.

Semper Fi DewrGleision

 

For sure, I feel the same way about the SSDs now after reading around a bit more, which sucks since thats a neat concept, no moving parts or magnetic doom, but youre right again sir, looks like theres a wait involved, maybe by then those holographic hdds will be on the market! And yeah, I think Id do RAID 1, 200Gb is a lot more than the 60 Ive got on this Z80K right now, and thats my biggest source of paranoia with laptops--hdd failure from any number of lingering threats. Plus I heard that there is a marginal, if really unimpressive, performance/speed gain with RAID 1 as it were--makes sense to me I guess, two drives looking for the same file? Gotta be better than just one drive! Man thats exciting that yours may be in your hands tomorrow! Oh the envy! I gotta find some place that finances until my funds come in, plus Ive got good credit I wouldnt mind risking, heh.

 

Mine will be here tomorrow...^_^
I'm restless with anxiousness, lol.

 

Am planning to get it from excalliberpc and i have heard that since its california based i will have to pay sales tax only in california and not in any other state. Is that true?

 

Yes, if your friend is in California and buys it from Excaliber then you will have to pay sales tax of 8.75% (the current rate in Alameda County, california).

 

Yeah it sucks when I find a good deal for something online and its based out of my state. Gentechpc is based in California also.

Guess just look on the bright side, fast/cheap shipping.

 

Been mailing with a local store today, they are recieving this from asus soon:


Model #: G50V-AS019K
CPU: P8600 2.4GHz, L2 Cache 3 MB
GPU & Screen: GeForce 9700m GT 512mb, 1680x1050
RAM: 4Gb DDR2
HDD: 320GB 5400rpm
Drive: DVD+RW

Model #: G50V-AK020K
CPU: T9400 2.53 GHz, L2 Cache 6 MB
GPU & Screen: GeForce 9700m GT 512mb, 1680x1050
RAM: 4Gb DDR2
HDD: 2x320GB 5400rpm
Drive: BluRay


Are these model numbers the A1 and A2?

 

Not quite.

That first one would be comparable to the A1. Difference is

The A1 has the T9400 2.53ghz 1066fsb cpu, while that one has the old p8600 2.4ghz cpu.

The A1 has 2x 250gb HDD's that one probably has a single 320gb one, or dual 160's.
A1 has DDR2 800mhz ram, that one probably had DDR2 667 ram.

The 2nd model would compare to the A2.

Everything is possibly the same except the HDD's the B1 has 2x 200gb 7200rpm HDD's while that one has 2x320gb 5400rpm HDD's.

Honestly I would prefer that one thats 640gb of HDD Space and the speed of a 320gb 5400rpm drive is very close to that of a 200gb 7200rpm.

The ram spec is not given so as long as its DDR2 800mhz ram, thats a great model the 2nd one.

 

Thanks for quick reply and clearing up

Good to know, I am still a bit undecided on which model to buy. Problem is the prices over here (Norway)..

The first model I listed will probably cost around $2400, and the other (with the T9400 CPU and BluRay) somewhere around $3000. That is a direct conversion from local currency to USD.

Maybe I should just order one from the states, though customs will take it's fair share, I might escape with a lower price :/

 

Yeah. I saw a similarly specced model to the G50v-A2 for $3000AU. For all you Americans, this is about $2750. I could import one from America AND have it sooner for roughly $2200AU (including taxes, tariffs, postage and whatnot).

 

What i wanted to ask was if i bought it out of california(that is in any other state) from excalliber only aand have them ship it there then i wont have to pay sales tax???Is it??
In that case will the the sales tax of the other state apply?

 

if your residence & shipping address is not in Cali you wont pay sales tax.

 

If getting it super fast is not an issue and you wanna save money I would bet that if you had them ship it for free to a friend in another state and then have the friend ship it to you would save a decent amount from the 8.5 % tax rate. But it might be more headache than the money's worth.

 

Hey Vicious, I believe the P8600 is new. It's a 25W TDP Montevina Processor, just not as fast as the T9400.

 

P8600 and T9400 both are new .
P8600 has 2.4 ghz clock and and 25W TDP as u said besides 3mb cache
whereas T9400 has 2.53 Ghz core with 6mb cache and 35w TDP.

 

I have a hp dv7 with a T9400 cpu... if someone has a laptop with a P8600 cpu we can do some cpu benchmarking... i don't think there is much diffrence.

//Micke

 

Yeah besides the 0.13Ghz difference, the 3mb of cache makes a difference of about 0-11%, where ~4% is already due to the difference in clock speeds. This is ONLY achieved during cpu intensive tasks though...
I posted a thread asking aobut the difference and the replies were generally that because of this small difference, unless you are frequently doing CPU intensive tasks, it's better to get the P8600 because of the lower TDW = cooler and longer. (fyi I was asking about getting a gaming laptop, so yeah the difference between the two processors was not as important as the difference between the two graphics cards)

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3246&p=12