Asus is one of the first vendors to launch Core i7 Mobile
notebooks, and the notebookjournal.de lost no time putting an early
sample of the M60J through its paces. In case you follow
notebookjournal.de, you're probably aware that the guys are pretty damn
serious and thorough when it comes to testing stuff, and the M60J was
no exception.
The 16-inch M60J is based around Intel's PM55 chipset and powered by a
Core i7 820QM processor clocked at 1.73GHz. It packs 4GB of memory and
Geforce GT 240M graphics with 1GB of memory. As you would expect,
performance is top notch, but it's still relatively close to the old
Q9300 in certain scenarios. Some tests make good use of Intel's new
Turbo Boost feature, but others simply don't.
There are some drawbacks too. The immense 45W TDP and high power
consumption, 81W in the test, mean that the M60J runs out of juice
after 91 minutes under load, which is a full 5 minutes short of Colonel
Gaddafi's speech at the UN last night. So, if you're a rambling
dictator bent on abusing UN delegates,
you should probably store your notes on a CULV-book.
In general, the review is rather positive, with battery life being the
only major complaint, and with prices expected to start just over €1000
for 720QM-based versions, the new platform should do quite well.
More
here. (German)