The chassis may not be a new design, but it's attractive and feels well made. The keyboard is comfortable to type on, although not quite as responsive as the ThinkPad's. The touch pad is small but accurate and the buttons give plenty of feedback when pressed.
The R70 can be connected to a high-definition TV using the HDMI port. If you have a large collection of media files then you'll appreciate the 200GB hard disk, which is the largest here.
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The R70 is the only laptop here with integrated Draft-N wireless networking.
Although the 15.4in widescreen display isn't as pleasing as the MSI GX 610's screen, it's still one of the better screens in the group. Colours look bright and rich, although there was some speckling and banding in our colour and greyscale transition tests.
Performance
Even though the R70 has a generous 2GB of RAM, it had to settle for a mid-table position in most of our benchmarks, scoring 135 overall. Its 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo T5450 processor is fast enough for most tasks, but was outperformed by Lenovo's, Toshiba's and Eclipse's laptops.
The R70 is also not very fast in modern 3D games, and managed just 13.3fps in our Call of Duty 2 benchmark.The good thing about the dedicated GeForce 8400M GS graphics chip is that it doesn't share system memory like the integrated graphics chips in the ThinkPad and Tecra laptops. We were more impressed with the three-hour, 55-minute battery life, which was the second longest here.
