Howard's G50V-A2 Review

I received my G50V-A2 today from Gentech, this is the 2nd ASUS laptop I've ordered and the first time I've ordered from Gentech (Two Thumbs up to Gentech). The first one I had was the G1 and had it for about 2 days before it went back due to the speakers being complete junk. I'm happy to report the speakers on this system are much much better. Anyways what I really want to do is touch on the differences between the A1 and A2 since there are a lot of A1 reviews posted already.

First there is almost no way to tell the difference between the 2 models other then the sticker on the bottom of the laptop and the "Blu-Ray Inside" sticker on the palm rest.

So this is my first Blu-Ray anything player so after I got my laptop today I quickly ran out for lunch and picked up the cheapest Blu-Ray disc I could find (that I would actually watch more then once) I ended up with Beowulf. First thing to remember is this laptop max resolution is 1650 x 1050, true full high definition is 1920x1080. Either way the disc looked pretty amazing on this screen. The laptop comes with Windvd 8 Blu-ray 2CH edition, I'm contemplating upgrading to WinDVD 9 or Powerdvd 8. I did notice occasionally the movie play-back got choppy (this was mostly while starting the movie or switching from fullscreen to windowed.

Now here is where the fun begins, when I got home I plugged in an HDMI cable to the laptop to my Samsung 1080p tv. This was a huge PITA to get working and I'm still not even actually sure what I did so I might need to play with it a bit more. There was a setting in the Nvidia options I had to set to dual display, then I had to hit a Fn (f8) a couple of times. Now here is something weird occasionally I'd get a message on Windvd stating my display can not play the protected content of this disc. Anyways eventually I got it working and wow, watching Beowulf at 1080p on Blu-Ray looked awesome.

The 7200 RPM Hard Drives? Ok, really haven't messed around with them much but I could really care less between 5400 and 7200, either way from what I can tell they are Seagates. Oh the way they partitioned the 2nd drive was odd too, for some reason they split it into two partitions even though nothing was on either of them.


Now for a bunch of other random stuff:

1. First time I turned on the wireless it had issues finding my router (which is a Dlink DIR-655) the 2nd attempt it found it, I put in my encryption key and it worked perfect, I live in a condo, but walked around to different rooms and the signal strength was excellent the whole time. (By the way this is Draft-N)

2. Only game I've installed so far was the Warhammer Online beta, but it ran amazingly, no lag or stuttering at all, was running it at 1650x1050. Was getting between 55 and 73 FPS according to fraps.

3. The laptop came with Lghtscribe Software and drivers installed yet the Blu-ray player doesn't actually support Lghtscribe.

4. The laptop came with the PC game Alone in the Dark, now I've never played this but has an average review rating of 50%, could they have at least picked a better game?

5. The laptop is a little bit larger then I expected I had not seen it in person before getting it, it actually is almost the length of some 17 inch laptops. It isn't to heavy at 6.5 pounds which is nice. It came with a backpack but since this laptop is so large it barely fits in it. The case and finish look really nice, the orange goes nicely with the black, I had a lot of people in my office today mention how nice it looked and most couldn't believe how cheap it was for what it came with.

6. I played a little bit with the performance settings, on the max setting at full charge is listed about 1 hr battery life, on battery save mode it listed about 2 hrs and 20 mins.

7. Asus needs some serious work on their webpage for updates compared to Dell. I went online to see if there was any updates, at work I saw a newer bios, when I got home and logged on to check it was missing. And description on he drivers/updates don't list what the changes were. The laptop comes with ASUS updater, but I don't know if its working, or it sure is not listing any updates currently.

8. Wasn't to much bloatware on the computer, I did uninstall the 60 day trial of office and I'm planning on tossing Norton, but I'll use the 90 days free trial it came with first.

Anyways, hope to play around with it a bit more tomorrow, if you have any questions feel free to ask and I'll try to answer them.

 

Howard can you post pics?
Do you find it heavy ? is the powerbrick too big?

 

Hey. Not too bad a review. Could I trouble you to run HD Tune on it? It would help a lot of us who are deciding between the A1 and the A2

 

hdtune would be cool as the HDD is the only difference except the optical drive.

 

I'm also deciding between A1 and A2, and the HDtune Benchmarks would be very nice. My G1S-B1 running Vista has a 7200 Hitachi 200GB that goes:
Min: 33.1 MB/s
Max: 68 MB/s
Avg: 54.6 MB/s

Access Time: 14.8ms
Burst Rate: 77.5 MB/s
CPU usage: 3.1%

 

Ok so this is the first time I've ever run this program and I had to run it a few times cause I kept getting a random weird spike when the min hit like 5. Anyways this is what I came up with:

Min = 31.4
Max = 64.2
Average = 50.7

Access Time 15.6ms
Burst Rate = 77.0 Mb
CPU Usage 2.3%

By the way this is the HD - http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...5a5e3110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&locale=en-US

 

So...

G50v-A2
Min = 31.4
Max = 64.2
Average = 50.7

Access Time 15.6ms
Burst Rate = 77.0 Mb
CPU Usage 2.3%

G50v-A1 (the better of the two tests)
Min = 28.9
Max = 60.9
Average = 45.3

Access Time = 17.1 ms
Burst Rate = 77.8 MB/sec
CPU Usage = (vicious had 2.7% and 5.1%)

 

anyway I go is a downgrade for me

Seems they should have kept the hitachi hd's

 

You always enable raid if you felt they weren't fast enough, which I doubt you will notice anyway.

 

The reason one drive was faster than the other may be partially due to the fact I raised the AAM one one of them but I could not get it to go up on the 2nd drive due to the port its connected to.

 

Here is something else I noticed today. The laptop came with a telephone cord, and there is a modem port in the back but its closed off. Not like I'd ever use one but why is ASUS even putting that cable in the package, do they even pay attention to what thye pack?

 

Does the notebook get warm/hot at all? I know the A1 doesn't really, but is there any difference with the A2?

 

Its for your house phone They figured hey we may as well be nice and give people a new phone cord...

 

I also received my A2 yesterday and so far I am loving it, it took me awhile to set it up in raid 1 but now that it is done I am in the process of putting some games on it. I have crysis on it already and it looks great, I also got 300 on blue ray and tested it out and the video quality is amazing. Now I need to get a HDMI cable so i can connect it to my tv and once i get that i will let you know how it goes.

 

This laptop doesn't get hot at all, even the air coming out the vent seems just "warm".

 

Awesome thanks!

 

Howard, do you by any chance have COD4 because i keep trying to install it and i get a error every time saying "Error 1309.Error reading from file E:\setup\data\main\iw_08.iwd Verify that the file exist and that you can access it." I don't know what is going on but it installed fine on my desktop i think it has to do with the blueray drive. But if you have it, try it and let me know what happens

 

I would like to hear more about this because im on the fence between A1 and A2

 

Sorry, I don't have COD4 to test with.

 

I do not see why the BR drive would not read a certain file on your disk, it would just not read the disk at all if that was the problem.

 

That is what I was thinking but I was reading where other people have had this problem and they said it was because some part of COD4's copyright protection or something where it does not work with some optical drives, so i don't know I will try it again and see what happens. If it dose not work again I am sure there is someway to get it to work so I would not be to worried about it if you were looking at getting the A2

 

How about making an ISO image of the disk on a computer where this works, and trying to run the game off the ISO image in your notebook?

Oops, who's that at the door? Copyright who? Aaaargh (goes for the shotgun)

 

The new copyright protection schemes that manufaturers have been using more over the past couple years depend on the software validating the precise location of data on the disc before proceeding, which will vary slightly when a disc is copied using most commercially available software and is why you can't use the ISO route to make a workable "backup."

There are tools that apparently can sidestep this issue via a couple of steps to maintain this data integrity, but that runs afoul of the federal DMCA legislation and is illegal so further discussion here is inappropriate.

Shotgun, bah..... in America, they would reach for their assault weapons - failed federal ban permits this .

 

Hes just trying to make it work on his blu-ray drive...not make bootleg copies, I just ordered the A2 so I would be interested in this because i am looking to play COD4

 

This really sucks for those that got the A2.

 

I decided to update to the latest version of WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-Ray today, I managed to find a really good deal so I figured I'd share it.

Currently Corel has it on sale for 79.99 instead of 99. Then use coupon code WINDVD20GIFT and checkout. Now you just paid 59.99 for their most expensive DVD player software.

 

What is the benefit of v9 over v8? Can you use unsigned drivers by chance?

 

No clue, but everywhere I read listed Windvd 8.0 the worst version they made. But the reviews on 9 are glowing, so I figure to $60 what the heck especially to get the full version instead of the OEM 2ch version. Also 9.0 will upscale regular DVDs.

 

I have installed all of my other games so far with no problem except COD4 but tomorrow I am going to borrow my friends COD4 disk to verify that it is not just my disk messing up so I will check in tomorrow and let you guys know what happens.

 

Awesome thanks, looking forward to it!

 

Id send an email to the company in charge of the games copy protection right away if we find thats the problem.

 

Success, I guess there was just something about my disk that it did not like, could have been a little scratch or something but I installed it using my friends disk and it worked fine and my disk works fine for playing the single player so I am happy. So do not worry about this it was not a A2 problem just a problem with my disk, sorry for the scare.

 

Just a heads up I removed the jumpers on the HD last night and reran HDtune this is what I came up with:

Min = 34.1
Max = 66.5
Average = 53.1

Access Time - 15.2
Burst Rate - 89.9 mb
CPU Usage - 4.8


As you can see there was a pretty significant change.

 

Wow! Very nice work Howard and thanks for posting. I knew there was a significant improvement on my A2 but didn't run numbers. This confirms what I see in real world performance.