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Asus has been making laptops for several years now but only recently have its laptops have been sold under the Asus brand in this part of the world. The quality has also improved significantly over the years and the latest models can be compared with some of the more well known brand names. The A6Km-Q002H incorporates a lot of technology at an affordable price point, but can it compete with the big brand names?

The processor in the A6Km-Q002H is an AMD Turion MT30 clocked at 1.6GHz. MT is the 25W version of the Turion which means this is AMD’s low power model. The Turion processors have yet to evolve to the 939 platform and as such they can only use single channel memory. The A6Km-Q002H comes pre-fitted with 512MB of PC2700 DDR memory and a spare slot is available for future upgrades.

Oddly enough Asus has paired the processor with a desktop chipset, namely the SiS 756. That said, it doesn’t seem like SiS has a mobile part with PCI Express support that doesn’t already have integrated graphics, which could explain the choice of chipset. Of course the downside of this is that the battery life will suffer to a degree, which makes me question the choice of the low power processor in the first place.

Another strange choice that Asus has made is the southbridge, which is the fairly old SiS 964L rather than a more up to date version. This means that you loose out some of the latest features like HD audio and Gigabit Ethernet. However, Asus has added a third party Gigabit Ethernet controller so at least part of the problem has been addressed.

Wireless connection options consist of an Asus 802.11g WiFi card – which also supports 802.11b networks – and a Toshiba Bluetooth adaptor. Asus supplies software for the wireless card to allow you to use the A6Km-Q002H as a WiFi router if need be. I’m not to keen on the Bluetooth software though - although it is better than some earlier applications it’s still more complicated than it has to be.

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