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Notebooks have always lagged behind desktops in speed, screen size, and until recently storage space. Asus released two new laptops, being the M70S and M50S, both of which hold the claim as being the world's first laptops with 1TB of storage space. To get this large capacity, the notebooks are equipped with two 500GB drives that can run in RAID 0 or 1, or as separate drives. Obviously this is a nice trend for notebooks, as people start storing more movies and games and want more scratch space for whatever comes their way.
Build and Design
The design of the notebook is very basic, with a high gloss plastic surface, meshed with chrome and gloss black accents. This gives the notebook a very clean look without standing out too much. The notebook surface is similar to the Toshiba Fusion finish or the HP Imprint finish in that it holds up well to minor scratches to keep the glossy finish looking clean long past the first day out of the box.
Build quality on the Asus M70S is average; with most of the plastic feeling very solid overall. One area that does stand as needing some improvement is the screen lift point, which is weakened by the webcam pivoting area.
When you open the lid, this area tends to flex upward quite a bit working against the stiff screen hinges. Beyond that the notebook feels pretty sturdy, with little flex when you lift the notebook up by the corner and carrying it around.
The extra LED lighting on the interior surface of the notebook is more subtle than what we see on most consumer notebooks. The power button and indicator lights are the only other light sources that might distract you when watching movies in a dark room.
Display
The WUXGA display on the Asus M70s is very nice and would be considered above average. It is very bright and vibrant and great for movies or game play. Black levels are quite deep, and there is only minor backlight bleed along the bottom edge. Some of this can be seen as a brighter "bump" on the taskbar during normal use, but it is still very minor. One flaw that the screen had that you don't tend to see that often on glossy screens is a minor grainy look, but it was only visible on solid bright colors like white.
Performance
System performance not problem with the Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 dedicated graphics with 1GB of video memory. While the system did have 4GB of RAM preconfigured, only 3GB was recognized in Windows Vista with the 32bit version of Home Premium. I was actually kind of surprised to see that amount of RAM and not find 64bit Vista installed.
The twin 500GB Hitachi 5400rpm drives performed quite well, and with options to configure them in a RAID 0 configuration would be even faster. Overall this system would work great with most modern games (not including Crysis) and play movies or music without skipping a beat. In fact with the vast amount of video output connectors you could use this computer as the hub of your entertainment system. |
