ASUS has been catching the eye of many Best Buy customers with its newest gaming laptops. Both the ASUS G1S and ASUS G2S offer cool design elements and flashy colors. The bigger of the two, the G2S, is a sleek 17-inch laptop that the company is touting as the total gaming package. While it hits that mark with the 1,920-by-1,200 screen resolution and the crimson highlights (as opposed to the G1S's wasabi-green trim), the processing parts wouldn't necessarily give you bragging rights at LAN parties. But at $1,850 (street), it might be the perfect laptop for weekend and entry-level gamers.

While the G1S focused on an all-black exterior, the G2S's lid is plated with brushed aluminum against the contrasting black trimmings, a nice touch. The cover's handsomeness contrasts starkly with the series of tacky crimson streaks that run down the outer edge of the screen and extend into the keyboard area. You can tell that this is a gaming laptop by the colored W, A, S, and D keys, which serve as the movement keys in many shoot-'em-up games. The crimson theme continues around the 1.3-megapixel webcam, over the speaker grilles, and on the emblem. Gaming-system manufacturers feel compelled to add flair to their laptops, to keep up with their competitors. The G2S certainly subscribes to this notion, though the Dell XPS M1730 has them all beat with its bombardment of LEDs.

At 8.8 pounds, the G2S isn't as heavy as the 11-pound XPS M1730, but it's still likely to remain tethered to your desk. The 17-inch LCD widescreen has an eye-popping 1,920-by-1,200 resolution, ideal for exploiting all the visual details in a 3D game. It's considered a 1080p caliber screen—too bad the G2S doesn't include an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive to take full advantage of this resolution. The keyboard isn't as responsive as the one on the XPS M1730, and the mouse buttons' clicks aren't as fluid. You can hear the built-in speakers down the hall if you crank the sound up all the way, but they don't submerse you in a game the way the speakers on the Toshiba Qosmio G45-AV680 do.

A lot of the G2S's features are similar to those of HP Pavilion dv9500t, though for about the same price, the dv9500t includes an HD DVD-ROM. The G2S comes with only a dual-layer DVD burner, with LightScribe capabilities. The G2S has five USB ports, one more than the G1S has, though the G1S has an eSATA port for eSATA drives. The G2S has a single 160GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive. Media buttons can be found along the front bezel, giving you DVD control features like Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind, and Fast Forward. It also has your basic wireless solutions, like 802.11n and Bluetooth. In general, ASUS hasn't integrated cellular broadband modems into its laptops yet. The Dell XPS M1730 is the only gaming laptop that has this feature as an option. Of course, you always have the option of popping in an ExpressCard EV-DO or an HSDPA card to score WWAN.

Many of the components found on the G2S are available in media centers like the Toshiba Qosmio G45-AV680, the HP dv9500t, and the Dell Inspiron 1720. Its 2.2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 processor can also be found in media-oriented systems like the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (LED); moreover, the 2GB of RAM that the G2S loads is common in most Vista machines now. This raises the question as to whether the G2S is really a gaming laptop (as ASUS is marketing it) or a high-end media center. The Dell XPS M1730, which is a gaming laptop, pushes performance to the brink by loading an Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X7900 mobile processor and the fastest graphics card available in the market—the nVidia GeForce 8700M GT in an SLI arrangement. The G2S has a second-tier graphics card (the nVidia GeForce 8600M GT). It can play many of the popular 3D games, but frame rates aren't anywhere near the ones generated by the Dell M1730 and the Alienware Area-51 m9750. SYSmark 2007 Preview Overall scores favored the Dell M1730 over the G2S by 53 percent. Meanwhile, graphics performance—on 3DMark 06, Prey, and Company of Heroes—was more in line with the ASUS G1S and the Sony VAIO VGN-AR590E. Battery life seems to be lacking, too, as it scored a meager 1 hour 27 minutes on MobileMark 2007.

The G2S won't grab the same kind of frame rates as the Dell XPS M1730—they're not even in the same ballpark. That's not too surprising when you consider that the G2S is a $1,850 machine, while the Dell fetches $4,024. The G2S would be a more compelling deal (and more in line with similar systems such as the HP dv9500t) if Best Buy threw in an HD drive for the price (ASUS offers an HD drive on its site, but the version that Best Buy sells does not). As it is, you could consider the ASUS G2S a starter gaming laptop.

Check out the ASUS G2S's test scores.

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