G71 gets 9.0, how?!?

I'm not really convinced of the recent review of Asus G71. The rating on cnet of some brands seem slightly off, but thats just my worthless opinion.

First may I start with a correction. I have not the faintest idea where two cnet editors got 6mb from, but Intel QX9300 has 12mb of level two cache, identical to that of the desktop version. Here, even Intel thinks so:

http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2xe/mobile/index.htm


If I may say, I find the product slightly over-rated. 9.0, thats the kind of score that is reserved rarely for those spectacular, extremely well rounded products, and I doubt G71 is.

Where do I start, hardware then. As you said this is the first mobility quad, however, being a quadcore champ, while it does shine in multithreaded tasks, very few programs today can take advantage of quad, when its not, it will merely proform like a T9400 in most games and apps; you may say its futureproof, but that graphic card struggles with the latest titles at decent resolution; I think while a quad is good, at the present a dualcore +9800m(g71g-a1 and a2) are by far more sensible for the purpose of shocking cost, heat emission, hefty power usage and supporting app.

Then there is the matter of ram, I'd first like to congratulate Asus on shipping exact amount of ram to you guys, in the past, they often shipped cnet systems with 'less' than in the final retail system. Nonsenses aside, I'd like to remark upon the fact that while in theory double data 3 modules are superior in bandwidth and power consumption, in practice, they are mostly just plain overpriced and dont make drastic improvements in actual proformance.

Also have you guys checked that its really DDR3? I've heard else not just once, where that the G71's memory when shipped is operating at 800mhz BY DEFAULT, and not DDR3 despite advertising at time of purchase.

They might have underclocked it to keep in line with FSB, but some asus suppliers actually admitted they are shipping DDR2 with G71. If you guys got it directly from Asus PR, then its probably as spec says, but definately inconsistency often occurs with their ram, and its rich of you people complementing things that may not specifically apply to us the consumers.

3gb of ram at that price? Its a bit short? the laptop has 3 slots and could use 6gb; for goodness sakes, even a £500 lappy could have more; believe me, the new gta is extremely ram hogging, it I nearly ran out on my desktop, which runs 64 bit with 4gb ram, I certainly dont believe at this kind of price, a potential buyer ought to worry about running out of ram.

Continued.

Its curious how this specific model is placed, it has a backbone of quad core processor but a 9700?!? Why not the include the raw power of 9800m Gs with the quad, as seen on G71g-A1/2? As result this will not be able to play latest games at decent resolution. To be fair, forget 9700m, even a pair of 9800m Gtx has trouble with crisis at full setting, but thats crisis.

And have half decent battery life? maybe I'd expect 100 minutes, but of 37 minutes... I'm wordless.

I initially thought you guys wrote 1 hour and 37 minutes, but when I read 37, I was shocked. I'm I the only one seeing a problem?!? Even Clevo's D901 with desktop quad, dual graphics and three hard drives have battery life of about 1 hour under full load... 37 minutes, while most who get this dont do it for mobility, but this is a new record low, and is definately really serious flaw.

Then there is a few smaller issues. This machine has express gate as you said, it also has hardware raid controller, but express gate lacks any power management, and strangely will not work with raid turned on.

Direct console does not work in anything but vista, while this is a tiny thing, those wanting xp?too bad. Oled function is limited as well, you cant use it in some os neither.
Where as on some high priced laptop, there are backlit keys, Which I'm sure is something Rory would like, where is it?!? With premium comes premium expectations.

I hate to say this, but 3D mark of this is done with latest driver on G71, how is that fair to digup and compare to m1730 on early driver? As unimpressive as 9700m is next to 9800, two of them will score far more than that margin nowadays. That m1730 is also frigging ancient, in price range, one can cranked up m1730 with a 8800m gtx and bluray(beats dual 8700m down), a bit more, your looking at 8800m sli.

Also 3Dmark06 is highly synthetic in nature, and especially with there mid range directx 10 cpu, they are quite far from representing real gaming bench which will be far less impressive on this system. Not to mention 3Dmark has serious weighing on cpu, in fact, the score of this machine would be saturated with the rating of the quad core, how about some real benchmark games results like most review?even cnet usa has that.

As respected and trusted review site, could a dell benchmark rerun with new drivers be too much to ask for?