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.

The M70 comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 dedicated graphics card with a massive 1GB of video memory and support for DirectX 10.1. Despite that it delivered below average results in our benchmarking tests, managing to pull in just 3323 3DMarks with the power settings on maximum performance. It goes to show that video memory is not the be all and end all with graphics cards. The 1GB of video memory can’t disguise the fact that the HD3650 is a mid-range graphics card that is not suited to gaming – especially on a high resolution screen. In that light, offering support for DirectX 10.1 also seems a bit of a contradiction. You need more grunt than the HD3650 can provide to get smooth playback on taxing games such as Crysis.

Don’t expect the battery to hold out for long on when gaming, either. Battery life is rated at around 2 hours 20 minutes in power saving mode, but we noticed a huge drop in battery life under more intensive use. It will usually see you through to the end of a movie, but when running at maximum performance, such as when gaming, you’ll be lucky to get an hour of juice. Fortunately you’re unlikely to be carrying a laptop this size too far from a power outlet.

One of the biggest let downs in laptops – especially among desktop replacements so heavily marketed as all-in-one entertainment solutions – is the lack of high quality audio output. ASUS gives sound the attention it deserves, however, with built-in Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers and Dolby Home Theater support. It’s never going to rival a real home cinema, but there’s more detail and clarity that many rival entertainment notebooks, in which the sound often ends up one big audio mess.

Of course if you want home theatre sound – and vision – you can hook the M70 up to your home entertainment system like any Blu-ray player. The HDMI and S/PDIF outputs ensure clear digital pictures and sound are delivered to your TV and AV receiver.

ASUS have gone with a glossy piano black lid and bezel around the screen and rotating 1.3-megapixel camera, with a glossy grey finish around the keyboard. The lid uses ASUS’s Infusion technology to protect from scratches while the inlaid, irregular pinstripes give it a non-conventional, yet stylish look.

You get a full sized keyboard and numeric keypad – two welcome and increasingly common features on ASUS notebooks – with the track pad properly positioned beneath the centre of the main keyboard so it’s easy to use while typing. The trackpad also features handy media shortcut buttons for controlling playback and volume.

ASUS have also included 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for easy wireless networking as you relocate from room to room, while the other connections include four USB 2.0 ports, one mini FireWire, a proprietary AV in connection for use with the included RCA/S-Video adapter (with additional TV tuner hardware and software required), an SD and MS card slot. Monitor output is restricted to VGA, with no DVI connection.

The ASUS M70 is a formidable desktop replacement for home entertainment, with enough hardware support and connectivity options to function as a stand-alone unit or a part of your living room set-up. If you’re in it for the gaming, there are better models on the market, as gaming at 1920 x 1200 resolution would tax even the best desktop graphics cards, but as a Blu-ray player you can enjoy in any room in the house, this is an impressive solution.