ASUS G1S 15.4″ Gaming Notebook

We are in the works of creating a new testing methodology for our notebook testing, so instead of focusing on synthetic and other system benchmarks, we are going to focus on just game-related benchmarks here. Given that this is a gaming notebook, chances are good that 99% of it’s purchasers care about gaming performance more than anything else.

Because no WinXP drivers were available at the time of this review, I decided to stick with Windows Vista Home Premium. All Windows Updates were applied. ASUS had a newer NVIDIA driver available on their site, so I installed that in replacement of the original.

We used eight games for our testing, all titles that are suited for a notebook with these specs. We didn’t test out brand new games, such as Bioshock or Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, simply because those games have incredible details and would run better on a notebook with a beefier GPU. This is not to say that those games will not run, but the required resolution and settings would not be desirable.

Throughout our testing, our goal was to keep the resolution for each game as high as we could, as lowering a resolution far below native resolution on any LCD looks less-than-desirable. Therefore, we chose 1280×1024 as our lowest point, because even though it’s not a widescreen resolution, it still was very playable and crisp.

All games were played manually, using FRAPS as the tool for capturing our Minimum and Average FPS. All results are found in the table below.

All of the games we ran worked great, even STALKER, which surprised me. Supreme Commander has the lowest avg FPS of the bunch, but being an RTS, it’s one of those games that doesn’t require extreme performance to be completely playable. While the game didn’t exactly run like a dream, it didn’t run so poorly that you would still not enjoy it.

For miscellaneous other tests, I ran both MobileMark 2007 and SYSmark 2007 Preview, which delivered these scores:

While the SYSmark results are not that important to those who have no basis for comparison, we are keeping them on hand so that we will have a basis of comparison in our upcoming notebook evaluations. As is the case with all gaming notebooks, the battery life exhibited here is far from stellar. In fact, 94 minutes for a DVD is painful. The G1S is meant to be portable, but also meant to be used where a power socket is available.