Holy hardware Batman! ASUS launch world's first 1 Terabyte laptop

Davey Winder
Friday, 27 June 2008 17:46

Your IT - Home IT

If the 1GB graphics, 4GB of RAM and high definition Blu-ray are not enough, perhaps ASUS can tempt you with the truly outrageous 1000GB of hard drive storage on this monster laptop. And then there's Batman of course...

ASUS UK has today launched what it claims to be the world's first laptop to be sold with 1 Terabyte, that's 1000GB in case you didn't know, of hard drive storage as standard. The ASUS M70SA promises to deliver on power, performance and that all important wow factor.

If laptop spec bragging rights float your boat, you will love this.

Let's start with that outrageous storage capability. Enough, ASUS insists, to store 358 movies, hundreds of thousands of songs or half a million photos. Rather than being a single 1TB unit, it appears that the M70SA will ship with two 500GB drives.

ASUS argue that with 1TB on-board you really don't need to worry about external storage any more. However, it strikes me that with all that storage on the laptop it is only sensible to have some kind of external backup strategy. Whether that is in the form of an external drive, network attached storage or online backup is up to you. But get anywhere near the capacity of the ASUS M70SA and it is not going to be a cheap option nor quick backup option.

Powering the laptop is a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, running Windows Vista Ultimate. Users need not worry that Vista will be sluggish, there is plenty of graphics oomph under the bonnet to drive the flashy OS interface. This power comes courtesy of an ATI HD3650 with 1GB VRAM, backed up by 4GB of DDRII system RAM, driving an impressive 17" high definition screen.

The screen itself responds to ambient lighting and sports a full HD 2.3 million pixel 1920 x 1200 WUXGA display. That's Wide screen Ultra eXtended Graphics Array in case you wondered.

The audio experience has not been left behind  by the rest of this impressive technology. ASUS has no less than four top end Altec Lansing speakers and a sub woofer to produce a decent Dolby Digital sound.

See next page for Batman and pricing?