ASUS IS PREMIERING its line of Intel quad-core powered notebooks with the G71v today. This is a Core 2 Extreme QX9300/2.53GHz clock-equipped purring along on a 1066MHz bus and sporting a puny 12MB of L2 cache. The 17-inch deskwarmer also sports dual hard drives and DDR3-1333 memory (or 1066 depending who you ask, we’re waiting for an answer).

They’ve dropped the SLI that the G70 sported in favour of a single 9700M GT, hardly high-end gaming, but they’re pushing the quad-core not the graphics performance aren’t they? Why would you want graphics performance on a 1920x1200 panel? Why indeed…

Oh, you do get HDMI in case you want to game on your big screen TV.

You’ve also got presets for processor performance so you can crank up the core whenever you’re gaming and grind to a (almost) halt with the lower power-saving presets. They call it LevelUp.

The box maker from Taiwan decided to add some led lighting around the edges, bling to make things interesting. They also added a ROG LED-lit logo on the top cover, which gives it a little bit more that Alienware look.

There’ll be Wimax versions of this kit available later down the line, although we’re hard pressed to understand why you’d lug around something this big and heavy to enjoy Wimax…

Asus is obviously playing the ‘extreme’ card and thinks quad-core laptops are a means to an end. We agree provided all you do is Folding@home and play Supreme Commander.

Guess we’ll ask Asus to send one Charlie’s way. µ