Mar 12, 2011 08:54 GMT  ·  By

It appears that ASUS is making good on its plans to sell mobile computers powered by Intel's Huron River platform, one of them being the K73 which, having been announced weeks ago, is becoming widely available.

Since Intel discovered that particularly nasty flaw with its 6-series chipset several weeks ago, its many partners had to cease shipments of all motherboards and laptops based on it.

This led to a vacuum of sorts and seriously affected the financial performance of companies like ECS and ASRock, among others, which also had to deal with fewer working days in February.

Fortunately, with the worst having passed, sales should recover during March and April and IT players are already selling products based on the B3 stepping.

One of those machines is the K73 notebook from ASUS, which utilizes an Intel Core i3-2310M, Core i5-2410M or Core i7-2630QM central processing unit.

Whichever chip is selected is complemented by a solid amount of RAM (random access memory), up to 8 GB to be more precise.

Additionally, instead of just settling for the built-in Intel HD graphics, one may decide to include a discrete GeForce GT 540M graphics card (1 GB of memory) as well.

As for storage, there is a Blu-ray combo optical disk drive, plus the obligatory hard disk drive with a capacity of up to 750 GB.

Of course, the full set of connectivity and I/O options is there as well, the list including such things as Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, a 0.3 megapixel webcam, a 3-in-1 card reader and Altec Lansing speakers.

Finally, an HDMI output can be used for streaming to an HDTV when the 17.3-inch, 1,600 x 900 pixel display is not good enough.

All the above are powered by a 6-cell battery and handled by the Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate, Professional, Home Premium or Home Basic operating system and can supposedly be bought for a starting price of 500 Euro.