Asus M70 review

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