Kobalt Comanche SLI

Impressions

Of course, it isn’t all just about the raw performance and benchmarking results, is it? If all anyone actually cared about was the performance of the machine then things like the Eee PC would be dead ducks.

And who watches a dead duck? Nobody, not even its mother. She just flies off, depressed.

There are other things that matter too, though not necessarily things that gaming laptops do incredibly well – things like battery life.

The Kobalt is different from most other conventional laptops here in that it doesn’t have a battery that can easily be removed from the shell. Instead, the battery is screwed directly into the underside of the chassis. This does mean that you can’t easily carry a spare or enlarged battery with you, but then that’s not something you’re likely to do with a system like this anyway.

The most limiting factor about the Kobalt though is, as you’d expect, the battery life. The Kobalt Comanche SLI uses a Lithium-Ion battery and that does carry a few advantages in that it won’t lose its zero-point over time and you can recharge the battery from any point without worry, but the actual lifetime of the battery isn’t going to be significantly changed.


We ran a basic battery life test on the Kobalt Commanche SLI by fully charging the system and then running it down to flat after setting all the power settings not to intervene on our test. The screen and system would stay running until the bitter end, while we set a stopwatch on the keyboard and entertained ourselves for the interim.

The results were unimpressive, but not surprising – one hour and five minutes almost on the dot, that’s how long the Kobalt lasted before the system totally shut down. Worse, that result was for a completely idle test with absolutely no applications running. Or, in other words, you can expect to probably half that time (and probably even less) if you want to actually do some gaming from the battery.

In fact, since you mentioned it, the screen is a tiny bit bothersome too. Personally, I’m a gamer first and foremost, so when resident tech-head Richard tells me that the glossiness of the screen is great for helping out the contrast ration then I believe him – but at the same time I don’t especially care. As a gamer, using a gaming laptop, my primary concern is always how it affects the game.


And, from my rather selfish point of view, the sheer level of glossiness doesn’t really help at all and unless you like to get to get in the Chris Crocker gaming position (put a blanket over you face and keep it there, dammit) then you’ll constantly find a bright reflection somewhere on screen. Worse, I tend to find that when I’m gaming the screen is always bouncing back the image of some dashingly-handsome twenty-something who can’t quite grow a proper beard.

Conclusions

All in all, the Kobalt Comanche SLI gaming notebook is like pretty much every other gaming notebook on the market for the most part. It has the usual draw backs of being big and heavy, with a poor battery life, but the perks of being ostensibly portable, compact and undeniably good looking.

Going within, the hardware is unfailingly impressive. There’s an intimidating SLI set-up that can handle the latest games at high resolutions and there’s so much hard drive space that you could probably put all the porn in the world and still have some wiggle room left over.

There are issues, as always. The machine doesn’t massively outperform the competition despite the technical spec that’s longer than my arm and the amount of heat that comes rippling out of the chassis is likely to leave you seeing mirages unless you have a glass of water inadvisably close by.

Still, as an extension of your e-peen and as a unit in itself Kobalt’s Comanche SLI holds up nicely, with some lovely extras and enough hardware to last it into the next decade without hitting any barriers. Hopefully.

• Build Quality
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• 9/10

• Features
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• 7/10

• Performance
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• 8/10

• Value
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• 7/10

• Overall
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• 7/10

What do these scores mean?