ASUS M50Vm: heavy going gaming

Suitable for gaming and movies, the ASUS M50Vm has enough grunt to run demanding applications without imploding. If you’re on a bodybuilding regime of high calories and heavy weights, you won’t mind hauling this 3kg slab outdoors, but for the rest of us it’s best left chained to the desktop. There’s a reason it’s a little bit on the Oprah side of the scales though, with plenty of fast components lining its interior. It’s also got more multimedia shortcut keys than a universal remote, allowing you to tap into the many features at the press of a key.

Gamers will appreciate the M50Vm’s NVIDIA G9600M chipset. This 65 nanometre powerhouse buzzes away with a 128-bit memory bus (fast by laptop standards) and a 500MHz core speed. The gaming elite might scoff at these specs, but for mobile frag fiends it’s perfectly capable of running most of today’s games at medium level settings. Yes, that even includes the ultimate laptop humbler, Crysis. Unfortunately we couldn’t run 3DMark Vantage to give you a score, but we did run a handful of games including Crysis, and they all ran fine when set to medium detail. The NVIDIA chipset is also perfect for HD video decoding, which is rather handy considering the M50Vm has aspirations to be a Home Theatre in your lap.


A hefty 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 drives the NVIDIA graphics, giving a balanced platform for power users, while 4GB of memory is a stack of RAM. Sadly this isn’t used in full due to the 32-bit OS. A whopping 320GB hard drive provides plenty of space for your home movies, while Gigabit Ethernet enables fast transfer of films from your video-editing PC.



The inclusion of Microsoft Vista Ultimate provides the beloved Media Centre for your photo-viewing, DVD-playing, MP3-ripping pleasure. Thanks to the included HDMI port you can pump the visuals out to your expensive flat-screen, though the 15.4in LCD screen does a decent job in the meantime. Viewing angles seemed a little limiting though, making the M50Vm best suited to the solo viewing experience. There was a much worse problem though – when we first fired up the screen it appeared as if our favourite actors had all turned into sunburnt albinos. It turns out that the default brightness setting was cranked to the max, so ensure you tweak it before testing. It could be a side effect of the proprietary AI Light feature, which adjusts brightness based on ambient light conditions. If that’s the case, this feature needs tweaking, as we were in a relatively dark area when the brightness levels went through the roof.



The laptop’s media functionality continues from the high-end processors and screen through to the touchpad, which doubles as a control panel for media playback. If you’re ever stuck in a life-threatening shortage of movie viewing and find this touchpad broken, the cursor keys also double up as media controls. The keyboard has more travel than most laptops, and feels reassuringly sturdy. Four shortcut keys hover to the top left of this keyboard. The first turns you into a little running man, the next allows you to solve complex shape puzzles, the third puts a big S on your screen and, last but certainly not least, the fourth gives you a ring of lighting. Well, that’s what the vague symbols led us to believe – if we have to read the manual to find out what the shortcut keys do, they obviously need to be labelled more clearly.

Altec Lansing speakers (four of them provide surround sound for your lucky, albeit rather deaf, fingertips) allow you to listen to your chosen media without additional speakers, but like most laptops, playing anything with higher fidelity than youTube is wasted on their tinny output. Unfortunately there’s no optical output, but there is a 3.5mm S/PDIF output, allowing you to power a high end amp... provided you can find a store that sells the correct adaptor. After spending most of last weekend trying to find one, we can testify that this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Just because it’s destined to live its life in the confines of your study or home theatre doesn’t mean the M50Vm isn’t capable of occasionally venturing into the great outdoors. It’s got quite a sturdy case, with a very thick single hinge that would require a direct hit from a semi-trailer before giving out. As with most of today’s laptops, a 1.3 megapixel webcam is built into the case above the screen, though we found the performance to be rather dismal compared to similar cameras we’ve recently tested. It’s got the usual gamut of USB ports (three) and a single FireWire port. While the optical drive handles most burning media, we’re a little disappointed that it’s not Blu-ray compatible. Given this laptop’s otherwise excellent movie credentials, it would have been the icing on the cake.



As expected, performance was superb, scoring an overall PCMark Vantage score of 4,044, rivalling many mid-range desktops we’ve tested recently. But it comes at a cost, with battery life giving up the ghost 106 minutes into Lord of the Rings. Considering you probably won’t be lugging this heavy laptop out of the house though, that shouldn’t be a problem.

We’re more than happy with the majority of the hardware on offer in the M50Vm; it might have a few niggling complaints, but overall it’s a well-rounded, quietly capable media and gaming laptop.  Even better is the fact that it can be had for under two grand, a very competitive price considering the specs. The end result is a laptop that will service couch potatoes and game addicts equally well.