Most Asus notebooks are sold by other companies who buy them to assemble, rebadge and sell on. Asus does sell them directly too, though, and the A4700K is the first one PC Advisor has seen for some time. Coming in at just over £1,000, it offers decent performance and a good set of specifications.
The processor is a Mobile Athlon 64 3400+, running at 2.2GHz. Combining with 512MB of DDR RAM to push the Asus to a respectable WorldBench 5 score of 89, the CPU's PowerNow technology enables fast performance without draining the battery.
At least, that's the theory. In practice, however, the Asus only lasted 96 minutes in our battery life tests before it conked out - a pretty pathetic result. Given that it is 3.5kg, though, you probably won't be moving it about much and it'll sit on a desk plugged into the mains most of the time.
In terms of the rest of the specification, the A4700K has an 80GB hard drive and a dual-layer DVD writer for backup and burning home videos. The 15.4in widescreen has a native resolution of 1,280x800 so should be perfect for watching DVD movies. The graphics chip is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of dedicated memory. It's much more common to see this chip with 128MB of memory but it certainly didn't perform too badly in our graphics tests, achieving a frame rate of 25.7fps (frames per second) in Halo and 19.9fps in Doom 3 at a resolution of 1,024x768.
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