Rock Xtreme CT notebook

Benchmarks

There's very little to compare the Rock Xtreme CT to, aside from a full-blown desktop system, and since very few people have Pentium M desktop systems, there's not a lot of point to that. Consequently, we're benchmarking the CT against itself, by testing performance at the default speeds and then comparing that to the 15% overclock scores.

General performance

The potential of the Pentium M and it's platform is evident in the overclocked scores. With an extra 15% on the FSB, the memory bandwidth shoots up, and this provides a tangible difference in performance. both RazorLame and SuperPi show better performance and it appears from these scores that Rock's suggestion - that you can save yourself cash buy not buying the top Pentium M CPU but by clocking up to it - is corroborated. In absolute terms, the performance here is great for an everyday machine.

Gaming performance

The 7800 GTX provides as much performance as you'd expect. Even with F.E.A.R., the 7800 is able to stride through at a good resolution. In Need For Speed, you have truly next-generation visuals with HDR turned on (called overbright in the settings panel for the game) and the 7800 takes it entirely in its stride. However, we don't see any real performance increase from overclocking because of the resolutions and the high quality settings being used.

A note on resolutions: the 1680x1050 on the notebook is a widescreen resolution. Making games support widescreen is difficult, but not impossible, and often requires a quick change to a config file (for those games that don't support it in-game, as Half-Life 2 does). However, despite finding hacks for both F.E.A.R. and NFS: MW, we couldn't get either to work properly. We ran F.E.A.R. at the appropriate vertical resolution, which provided a fantastic picture quality. NFS: MW was not quite so good, but thankfully, the LCD on the Rock notebook handles scaling of pictures pretty well, and we were happy to play it at 1280. With more laptops shipping with widescreens now, we really hope that developers will start making widescreen resolutions standard within their games.

Battery life

This can often be difficult to judge, since everybody uses their notebook differently, but we wanted to give you an idea of what you'd get. Obviously, being so huge and powerful, you're not going to hit an awesome 5 hours of productivity or whatever an IBM Thinkpad will give you. However, conversely, you're not just going to get half an hour either, like previous generation desktop replacements.

Our first test was DVD playback. We found that we could get a DVD running for an hour or so, which is a little above average for the screen size. It's useless if you want to watch a film, but you'll get a couple of TV episodes in. We found that we could get longer playback if we were playing a ripped video off the hard disk, since it didn't require the DVD drive to be in use and pulling power.

In general productivity, we were able to get two hours out of just working on the machine, once we'd tweaked the power settings. We were fairly impressed with this - you won't be able to write an entire thesis away from a wall socket, but you can get a fair bit done in two hours if you try.

Gaming is an interesting one. NVIDIA's PowerMizer technology is designed to turn clockspeeds right down when on battery power, so that the battery life is extended for as long as possible. However, it means that our usual 'everything-on' approach to Need For Speed resulted in a total jerk-fest when attempting to play at those settings on battery power. We turned the in-game settings right down and played for about 50 minutes. After playing with Powermizer and getting it to not clock down the graphics card on battery power, we were able to get more like half an hour. Not exactly stunning, but then, the power of a 7800 GTX clocked right down is still more graphics grunt than on-board graphics that the vast majority of notebooks ship with.