ASUS G71V

Lets Start by looking at the laptop in general. With a grey / black carbon looking exterior and red trim, it looks quite the part.

It also has that rather striking HD display with 16 : 10 aspect ratio and not only that, its 17 inches, glossy and is screaming with deep colours and vibrant quality.

It also has a 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, Blu-ray Disc drive and nVidia GeForce 9700M graphics card obviously stating it is a high end multimedia / gaming laptop.

The processor is of cource quad core and with 12mb of L2 cache it is one of the top most powerful processore from the mobile cpu range

The case of this machine also has some useful ports, these being DVD±RW/Blu-ray ROM drive and an SD Card slot on the left side and ExpressCard/54 slot on the right. On the back of the case lies a Gigabit Ethernet port, a dedicated eSATA port, VGA and HDMI ports are also included. it also includes two USB and mini FireWire on the left, and two more USB on the rightand an audio input/output jack on the right.

The mousepad is nice and responsive and the keyboard is good too, the mouse buttons are also nice but are a little stiff to click but they are still ok.

There is also internal space for two 2.5 inch hard drives which can store up to 1tb (2x 500gb), battery life is also good for a performance piece of kit and the 4gb of DDR3 really adds to the speed of the machine, obiously going to perform very well in benchmarks and games.

It is also nice to see the speakers are pretty good quality also, provided by altec lansing

However, it is a gaming laptop afterall and its these results you probably want to see.

Although the 8700m GT is a good mobile graphics chip, it is not one of the best performers when you compare it to the top gaming laptops (alienware), it is for this reason that it could only handle games like crysis on medium settings with the resolution turned down to around 1,024x768, to gain 35fps which is a playable framerate, crysis is however as hard as it gets so expect to see better framerates in games like cod4 and fear where the graphics can be cranked up to the higher settings and the resolution also, don't think youll get it onto the native resolution of 1,920x1,200 though, which is a pity because if it was given an 8800GTX possibly in sli, then we would see the pure beauty in the machine, sadly however the price would be way too much and you would lose the point that ASUS is tryuing to get at.

here are the full specs,

2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300; 1066MHz FSB; 6MB cache; 17in (1920x1200) 16:10 LCD display; Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit; 2 x 500GB 5400rpm SATA II HDD; 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 RAM; nVidia GeForce 9700M GT with 512MB GDDR3 RAM; VGA D-Sub; HDMI; BD-ROM/DVD±RW DL optical drive; gigabit ethernet; 4 x USB 2.0; 1 x mini FireWire 400; eSATA; ExpressCard/54; headphone-out; headphone-out/Toslink; mic-in; stereo speakers plus bass speaker; built-in mic; SD Card slot; 802.11a/b/g/draft-n; Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR; 2.0Mp webcam

Well as you might have guessed, yes this is a gaming notebook, but it isn't the most powerful out, it won't get ultra smooth frames on high resolutions, but it will play the latest games, you just won't unlock all of the eye candy. It will however play blu-ray movies on the wonderful HD 1080p screen and will store lots of movies, mp3s ect on the huge 1tb storage drives, the speed is also well noted too with the quad core cpu and the ddr3 all making this a very speedy piece of kit.