ASUS M70 Notebook PC

More luggable than portable, the M70 weighs in at 3.78kg, clearly marking it out as a desktop replacement that can be moved from study to living room to bedroom at a moment’s notice. The centrepiece is the imposing 17-inch screen, which has a native WUXGA resolution of 1920x1200 pixels. That makes it large enough to display 1080p pictures from the Blu-ray drive without any downscaling or adjustment.

While Full HD is mainly designed to deliver better picture quality on today’s supersized plasma and LCD televisions, at close range it’s still impressive on the M70’s glossy display. The Blu-ray drive announces itself with some ominous rumblings, but once a movie is up and running is respectably quiet, allowing us to enjoy the smooth, tear-free playback of The Day After Tomorrow without distractions.

It’s not all about the Blu-ray player, however. With a massive 1TB of hard drive space inside, there’s also plenty of room to store all other video files, whether that’s your HD home movies or downloaded DivX files.

The 1TB of storage is not all contained on a single hard drive, as yet there are none for notebooks, but split over two 500GB disks. Benchmarking on HD Tune 2.55 resulted in an average transfer rate of 52.5MB/sec and a burst rate of 76.3MB/sec, which is perfectly respectable. In the unlikely event you fill the drives there’s an e-SATA port so you can attach the latest, fastest external hard drives.

Our review unit also featured an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 chip running at 2.5GHz (with 6MB of L2 cache at 800MHz FSB) and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. Not that you’ll get the benefit of all that memory. The M70 comes installed with Windows Vista Ultimate and 32-bit versions of Windows only support up to 3GB of memory, so the spare gigabyte of RAM goes unused.