Rock Pegasus 650 Dungeons and Dragons

Conclusions

Performance: After the heady heights of Rock’s Xtreme CTX, the Pegasus 650 chassis seems a tad pedestrian. With just a single-core processor, its media encoding was no match, particularly as this isn’t the Pentium M’s strong point anyway. However, gaming was acceptable. You won’t be able to take advantage of the screen’s full 1,680 x 1,050 with any recent games, nor will the Mobility Radeon X700 graphics be able to play some of the latest titles – we only achieved a score of 152 in 3DMark06, and you can forget about Elder Scrolls. But we found the Rock could play D&D Online at 1,280 x 1,024 with medium quality settings, which is what it was meant for after all.

Specification: Since we were sent the most basic version available, the Rock was naturally at the low end of the specification scale. This would have been a great portable a couple of years ago. But now that notebook manufacturers are taking portable gaming very seriously, it’s little more than entry-level, apart from the discrete graphics. Still, with the full range of Pentium Ms up to the 2.26GHz 780 available along with up to 2GB RAM, more serious specifications are possible.

Form factor: At 3.2kg, the Rock is yet again in the middle of the pack. It’s neither too heavy to preclude true mobility, nor so light that you’ll take it with everywhere. But this is a happy medium, as the size affords a pleasant 15.4in widescreen TFT and comfortable keyboard. Overall, we’d say the balance is about right for a portable all-rounder.

Value: For under a grand, this isn’t a particularly expensive notebook, considering the unique lid artwork. But then you should also consider that for £10 plus VAT more you can get a standard Pegasus 650 from Rock with a faster 2GHz Pentium M 760 and 1GB of RAM as standard. You can also save £50 by opting for one of the metallic or chromatic paintjobs instead. You do get D&D Stormreach with this machine as well, which has a £34.99 RRP. But you can already pick it up for £14.99 on Amazon.co.uk, so you will have to love D&D Online Stormreach to pay the premium for the limited edition lid.

Final thoughts

If you really like your MMORPGs, and have a particular penchant for D&D Online Stormreach, you might just be tempted by Rock’s new limited edition. If you are, though, a higher specification model than the one we looked at would be a better long-term bet, particularly with more memory. But you better hurry – Rock’s limited edition run is a mere 100 units.