Asus G70

General Performance

To gauge general performance we use a range of different programs that run a custom, automated set of real world scenarios. We perform each test three times in order to get a good groundwork and make sure everything is consistent, then we average these times to try and get a figure which is the most fair and representative.

Now, you might think that the Asus G70 will just fly through these tests with no problems whatsoever. 4GB of RAM should be more than enough to handle most day-to-day tasks, right? Well, yes, as long as you have an OS that can master all that memory and isn’t limited to a total of 4GB including video memory.

There’s also the effect of the bloatware and CPU to consider – will the G70 be slowed down by the sheer amount of chaff sandwiched onto that hard drive? There’s only one way to find out.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 three megapixel photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

It has to be said that the Asus G70 underperformed in this test, whipping through the photos in 353 seconds. That’s not exactly slow – as the Alienware M15X and the Rock Xtreme 770 both took 355 seconds. The Kobalt Comanche SLI is still the fastest performer, taking just 328 seconds.


Still, it isn’t that the G70 did badly – the end result was in line with the competition after all, but with 4GB of memory and so on, you’d hope that the results could be a little bit more competitive.

File Compression & Encryption

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt a MPEG-2 source file with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.

The first compression test was finished in a timely 131 seconds on average, placing the Asus G70 in the middle of the market with a good forty or so second lead over the Alienware MX15X, but again behind the Kobalt Comanche SLI.

The second compression test was much quicker, taking 113 seconds to complete. Again, faster than some other gaming laptops but hardly at the cutting edge of where the technology should be. With a 64-Bit OS and a decent quad-core CPU the Asus G70 could be performing much, much better.

File Decompression & Decryption

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted. If you’re an online gamer or are often installing new games then this result will be especially important if you don’t want to spend too long unzipping all those patches.

The decompression test is always the quickest test we do and here the Asus G70 didn’t disappoint. The small decompression, which always takes the longest, was completed in 28 seconds. The large decompression test took 15 seconds. Nice an quick, no?

Actually, no. The results are still consistent with the previous ranking of the Asus G70, with the Asus beating out the efforts of the older Rock Xtreme and Alienware but still not encroaching on the threat of the massively powerful (and expensive) Kobalt G70. Maybe the next test will hold better news?

Xvid Encoding

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

Unfortunately though, the results here were actually worse than most of the competition. The Asus G70 took 804 seconds to process all our video encoding, which is a good 100 or so seconds more than the Alienware and Rock systems that the G70 had previously beaten. Not exactly a good place to end the general performance test, eh?

Still there is one plus side at least and that's that the Xvid test was at least able to run, unlike on 64-bit systems such as used on the Kobalt Comanche SLI which cause all sorts of problems with our testing software.