Asus G70: Armour-plated gaming behemoth

Have a look at this -- it's the Asus G70 gaming laptop. We saw it back in January at CES 2008, then saw a shiny thing, got distracted and forgot to tell you about it. Thankfully the magpie syndrome has waned, so we'll take this opportunity to lay a few words.

As you can see from the picture it's not particularly attractive, but it is very 'gamey'. In other words it's huge, has more flashing lights than an airliner and a brushed aluminium lid that Asus reckons looks like a suit of armour. We're not sure about that, but it definitely looks like it could put a good-sized dent in your floor if you dropped it.

Specs-wise, the G70 is more hit than miss -- but there are notable fails. Most disappointingly, it uses Nvidia GeForce 8700M graphics cards, which are so 2007. The only saving grace is the fact there are two of them in an SLI configuration, but even so, we hope Asus upgrades to something a little zippier to complement the 17-inch, 1,920x1,200-pixel screen.

The massive chassis allows it to ship with twin hard drives, and you can cram up to 8GB of system memory into it. That's quite a lot. You also get Altec Lansing speakers with a base-mounted subwoofer, HDMI out, and an embedded TV tuner card. We're not sure how much it'll cost or when it'll ship, but it'll be out this side of summer. We'll bring you a full review when Asus sends us one. -Rory Reid