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Rock Xtreme CTX PRO Review Hot

Hardware Laptops

Written by admin

Tuesday, 24 July 2007

Page 2 of 2

Luckily if you are paying for this power you won't be bothered about this to be honest, because during games you can't really hear or notice the noise anyway.

The WSXGA screen was superb and games and DVD's looked great, more so for Games with no visible ghosting or darkness spoiling the pleasure and thanks to its GO 7950GTX card you can play titles such as Prey, Quake 4, COH, C&C 3 all at the highest resolution of 1680 x 1050 that the LCD supports.

Before we delve into the benchmarks as you would expect the battery life was appalling, lasting a mere 1hour and 20minutes on high performance setting, but this baby is designed to be plugged in and used at LAN parties so this is once again a mere after thought.

Some could be concerned that the DX9 GO7950GTX would be an unwise choice to go for as Rock will be supplying the 8 series version soon, but my sources have told me that the 7950 is still faster and our gaming hearts tell us that power is the key here.

For tests we used 3Dmark 06 and benchmark software from HOC, the scores are displayed in the gallery below. As you can see it performed well against our Test PC (when using the 8800GTS card we reviewed earlier this month) but we must point out that we are comparing the Laptop to a Desktop PC as this is the first Laptop in our review range and the Rock is also running a slightly more memory hungry OS - however it does show that the Laptop can be used as a great gaming source as the scores show.

For games testing we used Prey for our main test - mainly because the Quake 4 test was not working on Vista and again its results were impressive for a Laptop, achieving 46fps at 1280 x 1024 with 4 x AA, 16 x AF and Graphics boost enabled. Without the Graphics boost we were getting around 60fps. Oh we did slip in a Doom3 benchmark for fun - without any AA or AF it got a score of 116fps at 1280 x 1024 so this is pretty cool.

Ditching the benchmarks we then loaded a stack of games onto the Laptop, namely C&C 3, COH (Company of Heroes), Doom3, Quake 4 and could run - when supported - the games at 1680 x 1050 at pretty high settings without breaking sweat. When NVIDIA start to produce better support for the GO drivers the Laptop should get quicker.

Sound quality was great for games and the built-in speakers did a great job, though for watching DVD's the sound could have been louder, even when set to max we could just about hear the sounds properly, but this could be down to the Media player 11 that we used. You can also plug in headset either to the side of the Laptop or around the back, so you have plenty of choice here.

Value for money is hard to judge on a laptop of this nature because after all £1400 or higher is a lot of money, however you are getting a few free goodies such as a great laptop bag, a 3 year warranty with insurance (so if Rock went bust you are still covered) and it fairs slightly cheaper than its competitors.

This is definitely a Laptop for those who want an extension to their desktop PC, bearing in mind that the scores are based on a Vista OS - which uses more resources - and you can see that you will get respectable frame rates for challenging the gaming hordes at LAN parties.

Editor review : Final thoughts

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful


Overall rating		8.0
Design/Build Quality		8.0
Screen Quality		9.0
Sound Quality		8.0
Performance		9.0
Noise Level		6.0
Value For Money		8.0

The Rock Xtreme CTX PRO is a powerful Laptop indeed and for those looking for a machine to take to LAN parties then look no further. Its just a pity that the Laptop is not the quietest and its battery life is terrible - but you won't be bothered about this when you are playing games and laughing at the people who are having to lug their desktop PC's back to their car after a 3 day LAN Party event.

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