Gaming:

The Asus G50V has a GeForce 9700M GT graphics card, with 512MB dedicated DDR3 VRAM: a good card capable of handling most recent games. And coupled with 4GB of RAM, it passed the test of our gaming benchmarks with relative ease. WorldBench 6 gave a score of 97. For casual testing, I enjoyed playing Tomb Raider: Underworld at maximum screen resolution and High settings; the game ran smoothly with no stutter. Of course with all that gaming, we knew the 6-cell battery would take a hit as it lasted 132 minutes in MobileMark 07.

The laptop supports dynamic CPU overclocking and has three performance modes (Normal/Turbo/Turbo exteme), depending upon the usage. Some of our benchmarks, like PC Mark 05 and 3D Mark 06, bettered up to 10% in the Turbo extreme mode. Asus bundles in a Siberia SteelSeries gamer's headphone and Logitech's MX518 gaming mouse with the G50V, both pretty good. Mouse is ergonomic, and large, to fit comfortably in any hand. However, the overall gaming experience was marred by the glossy screen's poor viewing angles.

Conclusion:

The notebook comes with a backpack and two years warranty. Overall, we liked what we saw of the Asus G50V, and gaming is its only mantra. But, gaming laptops are a rare breed. They cater to a niche that likes to indulge and doesn't mind splurging more on extra performance, given a laptop's form factor. If you are in that niche, the Asus G50V is a worthy contender at Rs. 100,000