Jenneth Orantia09 June 2008, 2:00 PM
One terabyte is still a massive size for an external hard drive, so it’s remarkable to see a disk that big inside the M70 – the world’s first notebook to offer this capacity.
As well as being a full-featured desktop replacement, ASUS’ latest laptop is also a portable home theatre, with a Blu-ray ROM drive, full HD 17-inch widescreen display, high definition TV tuner and Altec Lansing speakers with Dolby Home Theater sound processing.
All of this cinematic goodness doesn’t come lightly. The M70 pushes a hefty four kilos, so it really is a desktop replacement in the traditional sense of the word, which is a shame as the M70 is designed to be shown off – much like a European sportscar. It’s one of the most stylish notebooks we’ve come across, with a glossy dark grey veneer, curved edges, white LEDs and a mix of silver, light grey and black accents.
And, just like a top-of-the-range Bentley, the M70 is fully tricked out. Sitting in the engineroom is Intel’s flagship Penryn processor, the 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo T9300, as well as 4GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD3650 graphics card. Extra features include a multimedia touchpad, biometric fingerprint scanner, 1.3-megapixel 180-degree swivel webcam, facial recognition login, and a HDMI output.
The multimedia touchpad is unique to the M70 and consists of a grid of media controls overlaid on the touchpad. Switching between the two modes is achieved by pressing the On button in the upper right corner, and it’s a cool feature that works well – especially if you’ve got a USB mouse attached, as you can then leave the multimedia touchpad on permanently. For movies, the generous dimensions of the 17in screen means you’re more likely to watch it from a distance, in which case the bundled remote control – which fits inside the ExpressCard slot – comes in handy.
Movies on the M70 are magnificent. The high-res 1,920 x 1,200 resolution had us thinking that DVDs would look terrible, but our copy of Zoolander played beautifully, albeit with some fuzziness and jagged lines when scrutinised up close. However Blu-ray movies looked extraordinary, with picture quality easily a match for high-end LCDs and plasmas. This is helped along by the excellent audio performance from the Altec Lansing speakers, which produce a rich and full-bodied sound that we’re simply not used to hearing from a notebook.
The M70 doesn’t lack connectivity, with four USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, ESATA, memory card, Gigabit Ethernet, modem, SPDIF, microphone and headphone jacks. Like many of the latest notebooks, it also comes with a HDMI port for connecting to a high definition television, but the lack of HDCP support in the video card means it’s crippled when it comes to watching Blu-ray or DVD movies on a HDTV – attempts to do so result in a ‘Your display environment does not support protected content playback’ error.
Considering the top-end specs, we were expecting the M70 to scream through the PCMark05 and 3DMark06 benchmarks, but the results were disappointing. Running PCMark05, the M70 achieved a score of 2,791 – about half what you’d expect from a machine of this calibre. But a quick look through the pre-installed applications reveals why. ASUS loads a lot of bloatware on the M70, and removing all the junk from startup should go a long way towards boosting performance.
The 3DMark06 score of 2,516 is also low for a discrete graphics card, and it’s an uphill struggle to get any of the latest 3D first-person-shooters running well on it. Crysis, for instance, was just barely playable at the lowest quality level, but it would regularly freeze the system.
Desktop replacements usually aren’t very fuel-efficient, so the hour and a half of battery life it achieved using our DVD run-down test is about average – this translates to around two and a half hour’s worth of regular usage.
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