Finally! Time to play some games and I admit that I approached this phase of the blog with extreme excitement. I wanted to look at 3 things specifically; overall performance, battery life and what kind of heat would be generated while playing with this on my lap (and would I need to get my asbestos trousers back from the cleaners?)
On paper, the G71V looks to be a serious gaming machine given that it has an Intel Quad-Core CPU, 4GB of DDR2 1333MHz SDRAM and the main feature, the nVidia 9700M GT GDDR3 512MB graphics card. This may not be the fastest nVidia card for laptops currently available but it is sufficiently powerful enough to handle most of the games you can throw at it so I thought I’d try a variety to fully test the G71V.
My list included: GRID, Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare, MS Flight Simulator X, F.E.A.R., Lock On:Modern Air Combat and finally, Crysis, the game that usually reduces most gaming PC’s to complete and utter nervous wrecks.
First up, I installed CoD4. One thing to note here is that the G71V has a massive 1TB of hard drive space, so you aren’t going to run out of space anytime soon by installing all your games, loading up movies and moving your music collection onto this machine.
I fired up CoD4 and immediately went to the display options menu, set the resolution to 1920 x 1200 and everything else to the maximum levels available. The game ran fairly smoothly, although there was some jerkiness and that’s the last thing you need while playing a first-person shooter online. I reduced the settings to a more moderate 1,280 x 1,024 and
GRID was a pleasure. Again, I went straight to the graphics options, changed the settings to 1920 x 1200 and it played brilliantly. Everything was set to the maximum and apart from my rubbish driving ability using the keyboard, it ran as smooth as silk.
Flight Simulator X was again set to the maximum settings available and the G71V handled the game with aplomb. Great detail and textures, the frame rate was exemplary and I even managed to land a 737 without the seat trays being folded away or the seats being in an upright position!
Lock On and F.E.A.R were also very well behaved and coupled with the Altec Lansing speakers, Dolby Home Studio and a great subwoofer, you can play these games without the need for headphones.
Finally, the ultimate test of any gaming rig is Crysis. This game tends to bring most systems to their knees and the G71V was unable to escape its wrath. I loaded the game and allowed Crysis to choose set the best settings for me, fired up the game and watched as Crysis jerked from frame to frame, making the experience extremely unplayable. I changed the resolution to 1,280 x 1,024 and the frame rate was an acceptable 40fps. I can live with that.
The G71V has one main issue and that is, to run games in native 1920 x 1200 on the glorious HD screen, you need a demon graphics card. I think a better bet would have been dual graphics cards or the nVidia 9800GT rather than the nVidia9700M.
Overall though, I was extremely pleased with the G71V. It made short work of almost all of the games I threw at it, with a few exceptions but this shouldn’t put you off considering the G71V as a gaming platform.
So that takes care of system performance. The other 2 factors I was keen to test was battery performance and heat. First off, let’s deal with the heat issue .. or non-issue as it turns out. I sat in a pair of shorts, G71V on my lap and played CoD4 for a few hours. There was some warmth underneath the laptop, but nothing to cause concern and I would say that this is one of the coolest machines I have ever used.
And quiet too. I had the CPU set to Turbo Extreme which is an overclocked setting for the Quad Core engine and I confess that there was almost no sound. The fans are extremely quiet and do a great job of keeping the G71V cool.
Finally, with all the components sucking power to run all these games at ninja speed, battery life obviously takes a big hit. Don’t expect a lot from the battery and you won’t be disappointed. The battery drained completely in less than an hour, sometimes longer depending on the game but as I don’t plan on playing games on a train or away from a power source, for me this is a non-issue.
Wrapping up, the G71V gets a big thumbs up from me. The performance is fantastic, it is cool and quiet and is a worthy gaming machine.
