Digital Trends

Asus G50VT October 29th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Features and Design

Unlike Asus’ basic G50V model, which comes in a variety of different outfits, the G50Vt comes in only one $1,250 configuration sold at Best Buy. It gets an odd sized 15.6-inch XGA display, driven by a Nvidia’s powerful GeForce 9800M GS graphics card with 512MB of RAM, and a 2.26GHz Intel Centrino 2 Duo Mobile processor at its core. Memory and hard drive space are both supplied in abundance: 4GB of PC-5300 DDR2 RAM and a 320GB hard drive.

Besides an array of lights that rivals the Brooklyn Bridge at night, the G50 also sports a secondary LCD screen that can be set to display e-mails, battery life, and other messages regardless of what’s on the full display. 

Weight and Size

When we first pried the G50 from its box and got a feel for its heft, we almost thought Asus had made a mistake and shipped us a notebook from six years ago. At 7.3 pounds and 1.6 inches thick, the G50 is one of the beefiest 15-inch notebooks on the market, and a total throwback to the days when Pentium III processors ruled and mammoth notebooks were lugged across the earth. For a gaming notebook, some extra flab is to be expected, but the Asus even tips scales against similarly equipped machines. The Alienware M15x, for instance, hits 7 pounds flat and 1.3 inches deep. The G50’s power brick (which is an essential travel item thanks to the machine’s dismal battery life) is also an anchor in both size and weight. In short: the G50 sits pretty on a desk, but don’t expect to do too much truly “mobile” computing with it.

The Circus Comes to Town

If Apple’s MacBook resembles the Volkswagen of the notebook world and ThinkPads are more akin to BMWs, Asus’ G50vt is the Honda Civic with a neon underglow kit that rattles by your house at 2 a.m. with the stereo blaring. It’s meant to get noticed.

The main hook for the eyes comes in the form of copious LED lighting plastered all over the case. Blue LEDs illuminate the badge on the lid, run down its sides, light up as indicators above the keyboard, and rim the touchpad. We’re talking one step away from the deck of the starship Enterprise, here.

Further cranking up its visual volume, Asus has adorned the lid with a swirling blue-on-black graphic that’s exclusive to the Vt version. The light-up LED bars get covered over in a translucent chrome trim, and the wrist rest sports a hexagonal embossed pattern that looks as if it’s been lifted directly from the body armor in Crysis. The rest is an amalgamation of finishes, from matte black on the bottom to gloss silver and black trimming the keyboard and display. Even the keyboard has been given a glittery coating, giving it a subtle shimmer.

The combined effect of all the glitz and glam is, well, a matter of taste. Some in our office loved the notebook and couldn’t wait to bust it out in public. Others nicknamed it “the Voltron laptop” and saw it more as a laughable spectacle. Much like the highly customized tuner cars of the world that it seems to draw some inspiration from, individual impressions may vary. 

Ports and Connectivity

When it comes time to hook the G50Vt to a television, add peripherals, or pull data off a portable device, there really aren’t too many tasks the machine isn’t up to. It’s curriculum vitae is quite impressive: four USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, 1394 FireWire, eSATA, HDMI, VGA, an SD/MMC card reader, audio input, output and S/PDIF ports, and even a connector for an external Wi-Fi connector.

Not only does it include four USB 2.0 ports, they’re scattered across the machine with one on the left, one in back, and two on the right. This comes in handy when hooking up different devices. For instance: right-handed gamers will prefer the right ports for portable mice, the back is useful for portable hard drives and other devices that might sit behind a computer, and the two left-hand jack is readily accessible for devices like thumb drives.

For exterior displays, the G50 includes both an HDMI connector for high-def plasma and LCD displays, and a classic VGA port for legacy monitors. While we would have liked to see a DVI port for hooking up modern LCD computer monitors, the ease of converting from HDMI to DVI mostly makes it a nonissue, and if forced to choose between one or the other, HDMI is probably more useful in the end.

We were downright surprised to find a niche antenna connector on the G50vt, which is an absolute rarity on any notebook with built-in Wi-Fi. The N-female connector actually makes it possible to hook up exterior antennas to the book, which can be useful for anything from snagging Wi-Fi from a neighbor when your cable modem conks out, to wardriving with an antenna trailing out your window.

Image Courtesy of Asus