Asus computers of Taiwan produced the G1 series of gaming laptops in late 2006, where they hit a sweet spot of price and performance. The laptop got a model refresh in mid 2007 with the G1S, using an updated chipset. Both of these computers used variations on an Intel chipset produced in house by Asus.
G1 Motherboard Specifications
The original G1 motherboard is an Asus manufactured Intel Go 7700 with a part number of 08621GA0022i. It had a fixed front side bus and chipset with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU, SATA connectors for a standard 160 GB hard drive and one RAM slot capable of holding a 2 GB RAM DDR2 667 MHZ RAM DIMM. For ports, it came with 4 USB ports, a mini FireWire port, plus VGA (Video Graphics Array) and DVI-D (Digital Video Interface) ports for driving an external monitor. Its graphics card chipset was an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7700.
G1S Motherboard Specifications
The G1S motherboard, also manufactured by Asus, is an 8600M GT Intel CPU Motherboard 08G21GS0020i. It addressed a number of shortcomings in the original design, having an Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2 MHz CPU at its heart, a faster front side bus at 800 MHz and the ability to support 4 GB of RAM directly. The graphics card controller was a significantly improved NVIDEA GeForce 8600M GT, with 256 MB of onboard RAM, capable of driving an external monitor through VGA (Video Graphics Array) and DVI-D (Digital Video Interface) ports. The hard drive controllers were upgraded to SATA 300, and the hard drive was replaced with a faster model with the same disk space, and it retained the same external USB and FireWire ports of the original model.
Comparable Systems
The primary market for these motherboards are people who had this laptop and need a replacement for it; because they've been out of production for so long (three years as of 2010), these motherboards are hard to find, and consequently more than half the price (or more) of a modern laptop with the same or greater capabilities, such as the Dell E5500 and the Asus UL30-A2.
Tags: hard drive, Array DVI-D, Array DVI-D Digital, Digital Video, Digital Video Interface, driving external, driving external monitor