Asus M50VM

I'm looking to buy a laptop this month and after searching some of the shops here in Finland I found a great 874 € offer for Asus M50VM.

Could any owner of this laptop (or any similar ones) tell me a bit about their experiences with it? I guess it's powerful enough for playing the modern games smoothly with quite high settings?

To clear it up, the specs are the following:
- Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo T8400 2.26GHz
- nVidia 9600M GS 512MB
- 3GB RAM DDRII 800
- 320GB Hard Drive

 

I have an Asus M50VM-A1. The laptop itself performs great. You'll definitely get the bangs for your bucks in terms of pure specs. Everything runs smoothly on Vista OS. I can play Crysis on Medium settings at a bearable framerate. The build quality is very solid too.

The one major issue that I have and am continuing to have with this laptop is the significant amount of keyboard lag (missing keystrokes) that I'm experiencing. This isn't an isolated incidence. Just search "keyboard lag" on this board and you'll see what I mean. The disturbing thing is that I still don't think Asus has released any sort of fix for this problem, despite how seemingly widespread it is. However if you don't mind using an external keyboard, you'll have no problems.

Wait for more user replies before making any final conclusions about your purchasing decision.

 

I've got a friend who runs a laptop store selling the Asus M50VM.

The good points about the laptop are:
- Its solid construction
- Its very affordable price (given the components)
- Some very good extras given in the package

Maybe the only bad point is that the multimedia touchpad is far too easy to accidentally turn on.

On the whole, the M50Vm is a great mid-weight laptop. If you want a relatively cheap laptop, do consider it.

 

I had similar bouts with the touchpad, but found that you can change the tap area of the Mode 'button' to make it closer to the edge of the touchpad. In fact, there are a lot of settings you can tinker around with in the touchpad software (found in Control Panel).

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And I was one of the first to purchase the M50VM-B1. So far, the only thing that bugs me is the aforementioned keyboard lag problem. From my understanding, ASUS is currently working to fix it. Everything else about the notebook is amazing. For the price, I don't think you can find something that looks this elegant and performs this great.

 

I have to agree. I received this laptop as a free replacement for my previous G1S-A1 (defective piece of junk despite motherboard replacements). This laptop has restored my faith in ASUS after all the trouble that model gave me.

Above and beyond all, the thermal management of this laptop is what impresses me more then anything else. This is a really important feature, because the penalty to system performance when heat isn't managed is quite massive.. Basically the core problem of the G1S, amazing specs but it couldn't handle heat at all, so the performance degraded. Max GPU temperature is around 60-65C on this, while on the G1S it was over 100C. Big difference.

Anyway, I'd recommend this laptop definitely. Just be aware of some of the issues, first off the keyboard lag due to the touchpad. There are two solutions to this, first off you disable the touchpad in the system BIOS, OR remove the touchpad software and just use the default windows driver and you'll have no keyboard lag. Of course both options leaves you with less features.

 

Thanks Will1989 for pointing out the tweaks you can do in the touchpad software.

 

i have to agree, the reason i got the m50vm was because of the impressive things i heard about heat management. What good would it be to have crazy specs, but your lappy overheats so you cant even use them haaha.

 

OP, I guess you also looked at the various threads about the M50Vm, such as the review and the owner's lounge? If not then it's a good idea.