Digital Trends

Asus M70SA-X2

July 7th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

Our first impression of the M70S after taking it out of the box is that it’s a very tastefully appointed notebook, and not garish at all. It has a sleek black/grey motif with soft white activity lights that compliment the overall color scheme. And though it’s a large notebook, it is reasonably thin and weighs just 8lbs, which isn’t too large compared to a lot of desktop replacement notebooks. It’s certainly much thinner than the Qosmio G45, which is also a multimedia notebook.

First Boot

The machine’s initial boot required just 57 seconds, which is faster than most Vista-based systems we’ve tested, but only by about ten seconds. The desktop wasn’t cluttered at all, and the only bloatware we noted was a link to a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2007 and a Norton Internet Security window that kept asking us to register the product. There were a number of Asus icons though, and it seems Asus has loaded this system up with a surprising number of its own utilities (19 according to the Asus website). We don’t mind helpful utilities but it would be appreciated if Asus could organize them into a single toolbar or program, similar to what Lenovo does with its software suite or HP’s Total Care program. As it is now, the Asus utilities are spread over several different program file folders, and it can be confusing navigating them.

General Performance

We found the M70S great for most productivity tasks. It has a spacious full-size keyboard with number pad, and the pressure required to initiate a keystroke felt positive and comfortable. The display is very sharp and the glossy covering might be a bit too reflective for some folks, but we didn’t mind it. Asus also includes a utility that lets you change the overall warmth of the display or make it colder, more vivid, etc. It’s a slick utility and it’s easy to use and make adjustments with it. 

One feature we found highly annoying is the touchpad’s built-in media controls. What’s most annoying is the “mode” area, which disables the touchpad and turns on the media controls, is in the upper right-hand side of the touchpad. Our finger naturally frequented this area a lot since that’s where your finger goes when you are closing a window, and it’s annoying to constantly have the touchpad accidentally become disabled. Enabling it is as simple as tapping the “mode” area with your finger, but we’d highly recommend Asus move the “mode” area somewhere else, or just put a dedicated “media mode” button somewhere.

Asus has embedded media controls in the touchpad. It works fine, but they can be activated accidentally way too easily.

In terms of benchmark performance, it scored a decent 3563 in PCMark Vantage. This is a middle-of-the-road score; not too bad, but nothing spectacular. For comparison, Dell’s fully-loaded XPS M1730 scored 4,604, but that machine was loaded to the gills with dual video cards and a high-end processor.

For general desktop work, multimedia activities and productivity the M70S brings more than enough power to the table. Its dual-core processor and plentiful RAM allotment ensure minimum slowdowns, hiccups or other annoying situations created by lack of oomph. Its Windows Experience Index score of 3.8 backs up the fact that it’s a powerful notebook, but not exceedingly so.

We should also point out one other annoyance though, which is that its dual 500GB hard drives are both partitioned into two partitions, so there are a total of four hard drive partitions, each 232GB in size. We don’t know why Asus did this as we’re not a big fan of multiple partitions since it’s a pain keeping all your data organized. We’re fine with two partitions – one for the OS and one for data – but four is a bit unnecessary in our opinion.

Gaming Performance

Even though it’s not billed as a gaming notebook per se, it still has discrete graphics (as opposed to using onboard graphics), so we figured we’d take it for a 3D whirl to see what she could do. We came away moderately impressed with its power, but you shouldn’t expect to be able to run the latest games at the notebook’s native 1920x1200 resolution. We were able to play Crysis at a modest 1024x768 though, and we also got Call of Duty 4 to run at 1280x1024, and the games both looked and sounded great too. We ran 3DMark 06 as well and it scored a middling 2,998 3DMarks.