Gaming for everyone.

Affordably cheap gaming pleasure for consumers is the aim of the Asus G2K. The visually outstanding 17 inch desktop replacement has a very bright display and a wide range of interfaces such as HDMI and S-ATA ports. An AMD Turion 64 X2 CPU with 2.2 GHz as well as an ATI Mobility Radeon HD2600 graphics card take care of the performance. You will find out how this notebook is going to performance against its competitors equipped with Intel CPUs and nVidia GPUs in the following.

Trademark of the Asus gaming laptop series G1 and G2 is the outstanding design especially owing to the red A-W-S-D keys, the most important keyboard area for gamers so to speak. These keys are used to guide the game character of to control specific objects within a strategy game, which is the reason why it actually is a good idea to highlight these keys from the rest.

The layout of the keyboard and its nice and big keys were mainly responsible for the lack of an additional num pad. Despite the fact that the keys are put together in a narrow way, we did not find any evidence of problems arising from this.

Besides, the ergonomics of the individual keys can be described as pleasing even after a long round gaming round. The keys can be pressed easily and present a nicely noticeable pressure point. They can also handle harder strokes that however will result is a deformation of the keyboard mainly around the enter key followed by clicking noise.

The Asus G2K also provides the user with two rows with additional keys; one is located on the front side of the laptop where one can control the Media Player and one is put on the right top behind the keyboard. These hot keys can be used for example to deactivate the touch pad or to show the performance index. Nevertheless, the volume can only be changed via the Fn key and the matching hot key.

The touchpad is easy to use, so are its keys, which are separated by a glowing Asus G2 logo. There is not a scroll bar on the touch pad but this is solved when using the excellent mouse included.

Although most laptops are equipped with Intel CPUs combined with nVidia GPUs nowadays, the Asus G2Kfor instance has an AMD processor and an ATI graphics card. This equipment seems to be coming from one house after the two manufacturers merged together. How this combination is going to perform against the rival one is explained in the following paragraphs.

With the aid of the 3D Mark 2005 and 2006 benchmarking tools, we could make out that the ATI Mobility Radeon HD2600 graphics is on the direct level of the Geforce 8600M GT. While this ATI GPU is quite a couple of frames slower in the 3D Mark 2005, it performs a lot better in the 2006 benchmark against the nVidia card. The AMD/ATI combination is slightly faster than comparable laptops using 8600M GT graphics cards but is a lot slower than ones equipped with 8700M GT Grafik cards.

Well, how does this actually affect real life gaming? In the Doom 3 benchmark, the G2K was on the same level as laptops with GeForce 8600M GT graphics cards. Laptops using GeForce 8700M GT GPUs and partly some SLI solutions are still significantly faster. The HD2600 graphics card is able to attain highly sufficient frame rates of 70 per second in "Ultra High".

However, the card performed slightly worse in the DirectX 9 first person shooter F.E.A.R. in comparison to a GeForce 8600M GS. Surprisingly the GPU seems to struggle especially with lower details, which could be due to the less powerful processor.

Current DirectX 10 games such as Crysis or World in Conflict were hardly playable. The results extracted from the demo versions were all very disappointing. Even when playing on minimum quality and resolution, it was very hard to play.

World in Conflict ran with acceptable frame rates (30-40fps at 1440x900px and 30-60fps at 1280x800px) in medium details and DirecX 9 effects on a 2 vs 2 multiplayer match. Short lags could be noticed during demanding in-game animations.

Also when regarding the application performance, the G2K only delivered less impressive results. 4242 points is far behind comparable DTRs and even behind the G2Ps version of the same gaming range. It needs to be mentioned that the latest Futuremark hotfix was required for both the 3D Mark and the PC Mark 2005.

The Cinebench R10 also delivered average results that are due to the relatively slow AMD processor. These results were behind Intel's T7500 CPU (2.2 GHz) as well as even the T7300 (2.0 GHz).

However, in terms of the hard disk's performance, we can say that this 160GB HDD presenting an average speed of 5400 rpm was pretty competitive. Furthermore, the 11.7 ms reaction time and the data transfer rate of 46 MB/s were quite good, too.

The Asus G2K is a cheap 17 inch desktop replacement that can be called as a gaming laptop. A characteristic of this device is obviously the unique design offering a very colourful surface and glowing lights on the display corners. Apart from the chassis design, the finishing is pleasingly well made that result in a very solid construction. Moreover, the very generous accessory does really convince - HDMI and E-SATA are only examples.

Also the input devices reflect the targeted gamers' market due to the outstanding A-W-S-D keys. There is a shiny G2 logo between the two touch pad buttons contributing to the overall nice design. Besides, we were pleased that the design did not reduce the usability of the Asus G2K and all in all the input devices performed quite well.

The display offering a resolution of 1440x900 pixels did very well in the test and delivered excellent brightness and contrast results. The subjective expression of the panel was very good, too that is mainly owing to the nice and strong colours.

Although the performance of the hardware was not that convincing, it is still capable to enable playing latest games with some quality restrictions. This also occurred when using office application.

Especially positive was the extremely low noise emission of the Asus G2K. While being almost silent in the idle mode, the G2K only produces less annoying noise under full load.

Nevertheless, this is countered by the exorbitant surface temperatures. On the bottom side the temperatures almost reached the critical 50 °C limit with 47 °C and users will notice the very warm top of the laptop when using the keyboard.

Despite the fact that the battery runtime was less impressive and is not very important for a DTR, a maximum of 2.5 hours should make occasional mobile use possible.