Digital Trends

Asus M70SA-X2

July 7th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Features and Design

As you can tell by its size, the M70S is a desktop replacement notebook, and is designed to be a “multimedia hub” of sorts. In addition to its 17” widescreen display that runs at a native 1920x1200 resolution, it also features a dizzying array of multimedia input and outputs. Not only does it feature HDMI and VGA-out, but it also features an AV-in port that can receive audio and video from RCA jacks if you have an external TV tuner. Additionally, the M70S boasts an eSATA connector for connecting at high-speed to an external hard drive, and of course features a Blu-ray optical drive that’s capable of reading, but not writing to, HD movie discs. It also features a FireWire port for digital video work as well.

Under the Hood

Like most high-powered notebooks these days, the M70S runs on an Intel platform and features an Intel “Penryn” Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.5GHz with 6MB of L2 cache. Although the M70S uses the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium, it still has 4GB of RAM, though the operating system can only see 3GB of that memory. Its Intel chipset features wireless A/G/N support, which is a must-have feature for today’s notebooks in our opinion.

Mega Storage

Possibly the biggest news with the M70S is it’s the first notebook ever to offer a terabyte of storage, which is one thousand gigabytes. It accomplishes this feat by using two Hitachi 500GB 5,400rpm notebook drives, though it does not stripe them together in a RAID 0 array like we typically see with dual-drive notebooks. Though some people claim RAID 0 boosts performance, we’re not fans of it since if one drive fails you lose all your data. Put another way, RAID 0 doubles your exposure to catastrophic data loss.

Multimedia features

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.

Downloaders and movie-ripper rejoice! The M70S is the world’s first notebook with a terabyte of storage.