Asus M70

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39030093,49296331,00.htm

Reviewed 7 April 2008

Reviewed by Rory Reid

Vying for superiority in the crowded desktop-replacement arena is the new Asus M70 -- the first laptop in the world to come with an optional 1TB of data storage. Yes, that's one terabyte, as in 1,000GB -- the equivalent of nearly 220 DVDs. It also uses some other very interesting components -- a 'Penryn'-edition Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM, and one of the new ATI HD3650 graphics cards.

The Asus M70 will be available from Micro Anvika for £1,599 from the end of April. It sounds like semi-portable computing heaven, but how does it fare against the competition?

Design
The M70 is a desktop replacement through and through. In other words, it's big, heavy and if you used it in public people would laugh at you. That's not to say it's unattractive -- far from it -- the glossy finish on the lid works well with the shiny grey on the wrist rest, while the aluminium border surrounding the keyboard gives it a very contemporary feel. Asus' decision to use white LEDs on the status lights and power button is a good one -- it really matches the rest of the laptop. It's not as gorgeous as, say, the HP Pavilion HDX9000, but it'll do.

Being a Media Center laptop, it's no surprise to find shortcut buttons for commonly used tasks. These switches, located above the keyboard, give you one-touch access to media playback software and let you cycle through five preset video modes that change the look of the display. These are optimised for gaming, movies, pictures, ordinary desktop use and a special soft mode that lets you use the laptop in a darkened room without blinding yourself.

The size of the M70 affords it the luxury of a full-size keyboard with a separate numerical keypad -- handy for spreadsheet users. It has a mouse trackpad too, obviously, but this one is special: it doubles as a means of manipulating media playback. It's festooned with icons denoting common playback tasks such as pause, rewind and volume, and there are two programmable 'buttons' that let you launch an application of your choice with a single tap. Switching between ordinary mouse mode and quick-launch mode can be done by pressing the 'mode' button at the top right of the trackpad, funnily enough.

More media-friendly features can be spotted around the remainder of the laptop. The left side is home to an HD DVD-ROM drive. We have no idea why -- perhaps Asus had a load left over from when the format was still alive and wants to get rid of them on the cheap. (NB: see update below.)

Round the back there are D-Sub and HDMI video ports, which let you connect the laptop to a compatible television or projector. You also get an AV dongle that gives composite video output. Sound is covered by a set of five speakers -- two just above the keyboard, two at the front edge and a subwoofer underneath.

Features
We're extremely excited by the prospect of 1TB of storage in a laptop, so we'll talk about that aspect first. Nobody's managed to create a single laptop drive that holds 1TB of data, but the M70 gets around this problem by incorporating twin 500GB drives from Hitachi. These run at 5,400rpm, have a 5.5ms average latency and 12ms average read time, so they're not as quick as some 3.5-inch desktop drives, but they're still mightily impressive in a laptop. As you might expect, the drives can be configured in either RAID 1 or RAID 0 configurations, but you'll have to configure it yourself as it ships RAID-free.

The M70 makes a statement in areas outside of storage, too. It uses the new Intel T9300 Core 2 Duo CPU, clocked at 2.5GHz. This is part of the new Intel 'Penryn' series of processors, which are intended to replace the previous range of Core 2 Duos codenamed 'Santa Rosa'.

The RAM situation on the M70 is a little strange. Asus ships the laptop with 4GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, but because the M70 uses the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate, it's only capable of addressing 3.12GB, leaving approximately 1GB of RAM sitting dormant. It would have made more sense to ship the M70 with the 64-bit version of the operating system, as this would allow users to make use of the full 4GB. You can always upgrade the OS yourself, but what's the point when you've already paid for the 32-bit licence?

There's better news where the graphics adaptor is concerned. The M70 has one of those new-fangled ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 cards, which were announced by AMD early in 2008. It's a solid all-round card that allows everything from gaming to high-definition movie playback -- with the added bonus of being quite energy efficient. It uses ATI's PowerPlay system, which attempts to find a good balance between power consumption (when running on batteries) and all-out performance. Good news for readers of our sister site SmartPlanet.

It would have been fairly easy for Asus to wimp out with a sub-standard display, but it deserves credit here. The 17-inch screen on the M70 runs at 1,920x1,200 pixels, which is a very high resolution given the size. Users can enjoy proper high-definition movies, plus lots of desktop real estate for arranging windows as they see fit. One small gripe: the vertical viewing angle is quite limited, meaning the picture degrades if you're sitting in the wrong position or the screen isn't tilted in exactly the right way.

No self-respecting desktop-replacement laptop is complete without some form of TV tuner, and we were pleased to see the M70 comes with a digital Freeview card built in. Asus doesn't include a remote control, which is a little unusual, but you can always buy a Media Center remote from a third party. The laptop comes with an infrared receiver on the front, so doing this shouldn't be difficult.

Connectivity is well covered on the M70. It has four USB ports -- two on the right, two on the left, one four-pin FireWire port, a PC Card slot and a memory card reader. You also get a gigabit Ethernet port round the back, a modem jack and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Warranty comes in the form of a 24-month worldwide cover, which should add peace of mind.

Performance
The M70 will put in a pretty good shift no matter what's asked of it. It balked at our PCMark 2005 or 3DMark 2006 tests for some unknown reason, but rest assured it feels as quick and responsive as you'd expect from a laptop using a 2.5GHz dual-core CPU and 4GB of RAM. As previously stated, 1GB of memory is sitting around doing absolutely nothing, so enthusiasts may consider installing Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition (around £100) in order to eke out even more performance.

Conclusion
The M70 proves that laptops needn't be the poor relations of desktop PCs, particularly where storage is concerned. It's a well-designed, well-equipped system that will appeal to those with large file collections. We're a little disappointed it uses an HD DVD drive instead of Blu-ray, but it's a good alternative to rival systems such as the Acer Aspire 8920G. In terms of value, you'd pay around £1,700 for a similar Sony Vaio with half the disc space.

Update: Partially as a result of our feedback, Asus has decided to ship the M70 with a Blu-ray combo drive that can also read and write to DVD. We haven't seen this version, but we'll endeavour to get one in for testing -- at which point we'll update our review with revised impressions, and hopefully the benchmarks will work, too.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide