Product Reviews

If the ASUS W2P's row of audio outputs, huge 17in widescreen display and considerable bulk aren't a big enough a hint as to its home entertainment aspirations, then the HD-DVD drive really hammers the point home. This is only the second laptop that we've seen with one of these next generation DVD drives and while it can't write to HD DVD discs (only CDs and DVDs), it can be used to play back the high-definition movies being sold in the format.

HD DVD movies offer vastly better quality than DVD as the video is captured at a much higher resolution - 1920 x 1080, compared to 480 x 576 for DVD. So each frame of an HD-DVD movie contains five times as many pixels as a DVD.

Unfortunately, this presents us with our first grumble about the W2P. HD DVD movies may have a resolution of 1920 x 1080, but the W2P's screen only has a resolution of 1680 x 1050. This may seem a churlish complaint given that this is a high-resolution display for any laptop, but it does mean that movies cannot be displayed in their full glory. That said, although you end up losing a little bit of detail, this doesn't result in a huge loss of quality and the crystal clear images are a joy to watch. Besides, if you've got an external display that does support the full 1920 x 1080 resolution though, you can watch your films on that via the laptop's HDMI output.

Entertain me

The W2P also has

It's a shame then that the W2P is only fitted with an ATI Radeon X1700 graphics card. Despite a reasonable score of 52% in our Call of Duty 2 test, we'd have liked a bit more 3D oomph, particularly on such an expensive laptop. The X1700 will just about cope with recent games, but it will begin to struggle with demanding future titles.

Sounds good

Laptop's aren't usually known for producing good quality sound, so the W2P's four speakers and mini subwoofer are a rather nice surprise. While they can't hope to match a set of external speakers, they produce good clear sound with a reasonable of bass - perfect for watching on a film, in fact.

Of course, you can't watch films all day, so the W2P is also capable of dealing with the more serious side of computing. The 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo 7400 processor is currently the fastest in Intel's range of laptop chips and with a score of 150% in our benchmarks, you'll have no trouble with any task on this laptop. The 1GB of memory is more than enough for any application, too.

Inevitably, a laptop with the latest technology is going to be expensive, but you do get a fair amount for your money with the W2P. The display is excellent, the design sleek and with the powerful processor keeping everything running smoothly this a highly desirable laptop. If you must have an HD-DVD laptop, then we'd suggest sacrificing the top-of-the-line processor and instead opt for the higher resolution screen and dual hard disks of the HD-DVD-equipped Toshiba Qosmio G30.