Asus M70S

The M70S offers a fantastic movie watching experience thanks to its huge, crisp display, excellent sound system and Blu-ray drive. You can also store an unbelievable amount of your own movies and music on the M70 too, thanks to its unheard of (on a notebook at least) 1 terabyte of storage space. The systems only major drawback is the annoying media controls embedded in the touchpad. Not only are they difficult to control, but they include an area that disables the touchpad if you touch it accidentally, which was highly annoying.

Asus has added a number of features to the M70S to make playing movies and music easier, and the most notable is the media center controls embedded in the touchpad. The upper right-hand corner has a “mode” area that if you touch, disables the touchpad and illuminates a number of soft-touch areas that can launch custom programs, control the media player, adjust volume and so forth.

Sound System

Any notebook designed for movie watching better have a killer audio system, and Asus has provided a Dolby-certified three-piece sound system made by Altec Lansing. It includes two satellites embedded in the chassis above the keyboard as well as a subwoofer underneath the unit. The M70S lacks a volume knob however, so volume adjustments must be made using the Fn key or the soft-touch slider control on the touchpad.

Gaming Power

It’s not unreasonable to expect a notebook of this size to be decent for gaming, and along those lines Asus has outfitted the M70S with an ATI mobile graphics card, the Radeon HD 3650. This is a mid-range card with 120 stream processors, but it also uses ATI’s Avivo rendering engine to offload work from the processor when playing HD movies. It’s a DirectX 10.1 compliant card with a clock speed of 600MHz.

Specs

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5GHz
RAM: 4GB DDR2 667MHz
HDD: Two 500GB 5,400rpm drives (1TB)
Video: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
Display: 17” 1920×1200 widescreen glossy
Optical: 2x Blu-ray reader, DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW
Media: 8-in-1 card reader
Internet: Gigabit Ethernet, A/G/N wireless, Bluetooth, 56K
Ports: 4 USB, FireWire, HDMI, eSATA, AV-in, VGA, mic/headphone
OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Battery: 8-cell
Weight: 8lbs.
Price: $2,199

VIA