Gaming
Gaming should be the G50V's bread and butter, so that's where we'll start. 3DMark06 was tested at 1024x768 resolution only. For Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, we tested the G50V at 1280x720 with high in-game detail levels and also at its native 1680x1050 resolution with whatever in-game detail settings yielded a frame rate average close to 40 frames per second.

3DMark06's overall score suggests that the G50V does a little clock throttling when running on battery, which is to be expected.

That throttling appears confined to the CPU, because we don't see a large difference in frame rates between battery and AC power when running games at the display's native resolution. We didn't have to resort to custom detail settings with Quake Wars, which had little trouble running with high detail levels at 1680x1050. Call of Duty 4 had no problems handling high detail levels at 1280x720, but we had to turn off specular maps, glow effects, and smoke edge softening to hit our frame rate target with the system's native resolution.

Call of Duty 4 is about a year old, so it's disappointing to have to drop in-game detail levels just to hit playable frame rates at the G50V's native resolution. This isn't entirely unexpected given that the 9700M is essentially a mobile variant of the GeForce 9500 GT, which is a budget card that sells for around $80. Fortunately, Asus does offer more graphics horsepower in the G50Vt-X1, which sports a more capable GeForce 9800M GS that has three times the shader processors of the 9700M GT and a wider 256-bit memory interface.

WorldBench
We used WorldBench 6.0 beta 2 to get an overall perspective on the G50V's application performance, and we weren't disappointed.

With the processors introduced with the Montevina running on a faster bus with higher clock speeds, notebook CPU performance has hit new heights, as evidenced by an impressive overall WorldBench score of 95. The G50V's Core 2 Duo T9400 runs at a higher clock speed than the venerable desktop E6600, but with a much lower TDP, which is impressive. I suspect the G50V's scores in some of these tests are limited by the system's use of a 5,400-RPM hard drive rather than a faster 7,200-RPM model.

Battery life
Keep in mind that we used a clean 32-bit Vista install devoid of Asus software for our MobileMark testing. We tested with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled, and with the screen brightness set to 50%—the lowest level that was still comfortable to my eyes.

While Asus is a class leader when it comes to battery life in netbooks, its notebooks have historically been less impressive. The G50V is a nice exception given the hardware inside. Though it managed only 100 minutes in MobileMark's DVD playback test, the battery lasted for two and a half hours in the productivity test. The productivity test simulates real-world usage with basic desktop tasks, and based on these results, we suspect the G50V's battery could last up to three hours if used frugally.

Heat
Given that the G50V-A1 sports two hard drives, a discrete GPU, and 2.53GHz dual-core processor, I expected the system to throw off heat like crazy. The drive bays in particular seemed ripe for heat issues, with only small vents above them. The fan ran quietly, too, suggesting that the unit might have been running a little toasty. To find out, I first let the system idle on the desktop for 10 minutes before taking some temperature measurements with my IR thermometer.

As you can see, the cooling solution Asus employs in the G50V is more than capable of keeping the system cool at idle. To see how it dealt with a heavier load, I ran wPrime and the rthdribl HDR lighting demo for another 10 minutes before measuring temperatures once more.

The G50V's fan spins up audibly under load, but it makes more of a hollow sound as opposed to a high-pitched whine. And it does an outstanding job transferring heat out of the chassis. I measured an air temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit at the exhaust vent and 115 degrees a few inches away from it, suggesting that heat dissipates rapidly as soon as it hits the outside air. Asus' engineers should be commended for the job they've done cooling this machine, potentially preserving the fertility of male users in the process.