Verdict: The king of 2D, the joker of 3D
Some companies are famous for style - Sony and Apple spring to mind. Other companies find fame and fortune for reliability - think HP and IBM. And some companies just like making PCs and components that are insanely fast. Welcome to the world of Asus.
Asus is most famous for its stupidly fast motherboards, but as the lovingly named M6700NE shows, it can make stupidly fast laptops too. Mind you, this shouldn't be a surprise. Glancing through the specs is like taking a whirlwind tour of all that's quick about laptops, with a 60GB 7,200rpm hard disk, 2.1GHz Pentium M processor and 1GB of CAS 2.5 PC2700 memory.
However, while the prospect of having this much computing power in a portable format is very appealing, the problem for anyone hoping to take the Asus on their travels is that it isn't particularly small. It's 354mm wide and 35mm thick, and feels a lot heavier than its 3kg weight would suggest.
If you want to avoid talking to screen replacement companies, you should also think about buying a proper carrying case, as the lid doesn't inspire confidence; a sharp blow to the centre, for example, will cause problems.
To be fair to Asus, this is as much about the sheer size of widescreen display as it is about the quality of the chassis. And it's a screen well worth protecting too, as its wide viewing angles and bright backlighting make it a pleasure to use. However, the resolution of 1,280 x 800 is disappointing considering the screen's generous 15.4in viewable diagonal.
At least a 16:10 ratio makes it a natural choice for DVD movies, and with Asus making noises about how the laptop is a 'digital entertainment gateway', we had high hopes. And, for once, these were largely met. The Dolby Digital routine at the start of movies actually sounded impressive rather than tinny, and even soundtracks that needed some subtlety were sensitively handled.
You can also use this laptop as a large CD player with the power switched off: just slide a catch on the left-hand side, sit back and enjoy the music. There's a slot that supports SD/MMC, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro cards above the single Type II PC Card slot, but we were disappointed that it couldn't play MP3 files from an SD card. This perhaps isn't surprising, though, as there's no LCD, so controls are limited to skipping tracks, pausing and adjusting the volume. However, unlike DVD movies, regular music doesn't sound good through the speakers, so we'd recommend carrying a pair of headphones around with you.
And if you don't want to listen to music or watch movies, then you could still use the Pioneer DVR-K14AS DVD burner to back up files. With a top 8x DVD+R write speed and the ability to burn dual-layer DVD+R9 discs at 2.4x, it's a great inclusion.
PERFORMANCE
But any modern laptop is capable of playing movies and burning the odd DVD. What the Asus really promises is desktop-level performance, and in this regard it certainly delivers, at least when it came to the CPC Benchmarks.
The Asus managed to outscore our reference 2.6GHz Pentium 4c desktop PC in two out of our three benchmarks. What's more, it did this in our toughest tests, video encoding and image editing. People who think laptops can't keep up with their desktop brethren need to get their heads out of the sand and start smelling the coffee. And they should really think about sticking to one metaphor at a time too.
Part of the reason for it's stonking performance is obviously down to the 2.1GHz Pentium M, but the hard disk drive also contributed greatly, particularly in the Image Editing test. In fact, if there's one component that shows how far laptops have come, then it's the hard disk. The 60GB 7,200rpm Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 hard drive that sits inside the chassis of the Asus also has a whopping 8MB of cache. It's true that this won't make much of a difference when loading Word or playing Doom 3, but just occasionally it will speed up file transfers; it's also nice to know that you can boast to friends that your shiny, compact laptop is faster than their noisy, bulky desktops.
Where you might need to avert your gaze and change the topic of conversation to the price of fish is when your desktop-toting friends ask about games performance. The Asus was frankly rubbish, with its Mobility Radeon 9700 only managing 18.7fps in Far Cry at 1,024 x 768, and 12.6fps in Doom 3 at 1,280 x 1,024. We found it was playable at 800 x 600, so it clearly needs more than the miserly 64MB of on-board memory Asus provides.
To see if we could push it any further, we followed the advice at www.driverheaven.net and loaded up the latest Catalyst driver. But to no avail - the scores actually dropped. However, when you consider that the Mobility Radeon 9700 is actually based on the puny Radeon 9600 GPU, it isn't really surprising that it simply can't cut it in games that make heavy use of shaders. Asus really needs to get hold of the Mobility Radeon X800 if it wants to make a gaming laptop capable of decent performance.
We also ran into a rather more practical problem when playing games on the move, namely burned upper thighs. Or, more precisely, a burned right upper thigh, as the processor and heatsink both sit on the right-hand side. We suspect Asus was trying to ensure that the fan doesn't kick in too often - we barely heard it - but as the latest scientific reports show a link between infertility and laptop-on-the-lap use, any would-be fathers should take note.
With this in mind, we were quite glad that the battery only lasted for three hours and 40 minutes under light use, which means your nether regions will be spared a really severe roasting. Unfortunately, as many other Centrino laptops last for six hours or longer, it's perhaps not quite a blessing in disguise, after all. We like our laptops to last a bit longer, especially as games drain the battery far more heavily than typical Windows tasks. You should be able to squeeze a full-length movie out of the Asus, though, as it lasted for two hours and four minutes of playback, with the backlight set to maximum.
CONSLUSION
All things considered, there's quite a lot to commend about this laptop, but the trouble for Asus is that, unless it drops the price by a substantial amount, not many people are going to take advantage of its capabilities. For nearly £1,900, we expect perfection, and this laptop is far from perfect.
Take the design, for example. When placed against the custom-painted finish of a SavRow or Voodoo laptop, or the sleek curves of the latest Sony VAIO, the Asus looks decidedly dated. In short, it isn't a machine that you'll be proud to be seen with in two years' time.
We were also disappointed to see that the hard disk's capacity was just 60GB, although Asus assures us 80GB versions of the drive will be available as an upgrade option.
So, warts and all, can we recommend this Asus? Well, we could forgive the hot running, the relatively short battery life and the design if this laptop delivered the same sort of power in games that it does when encoding video, but it singularly fails to do so. Unless you're looking for an out-and-out number cruncher, we advise you to steer clear.
