However, the greatest limitation will be the battery life. We’ve become almost blasé recently about laptops and netbooks boasting seven or eight hours of battery life, but the X790 won’t even get you through a 90-minute feature film.
Not as laptop-like as it looks
We selected its "balanced" power preset, which attempts to strike a good balance between performance and battery life, and then looped PCMark 05 until the battery was completely drained. On that setting, we barely got 75 minutes of runtime, and even switching to the "better battery life" preset only added about another five minutes to that time.
To be fair, Rock is quite open about the limited battery life, and the X790 compensates for that weakness with some quite outstanding performance results. Not surprisingly, the i7 processor leaves most Core 2 Duo laptops trailing in its wake. Processor performance in PCMark05 breaks through the 10,000 mark, while overall system performance is about 60 per cent stronger than any other laptop we’ve reviewed recently.
Graphics performance is a particular strength, with the i7 and GeForce GTX280M combining to producing the sort of test results that we’ve only seen from SLI rigs such as that in the similarly expensive Toshiba Qosmio X300. It even manages 49f/s when running Far Cry with high-quality graphics settings and at full 1920 x 1200 resolution. It’ll certainly make a good workstation for tasks such as CAD or 3D rendering – as well as being a pretty hot games machine.
Verdict
The battery life is clearly a disadvantage, but then a 17in laptop like this would never be carried around coffee shops like a lightweight netbook. It’s very much a desktop replacement machine - literally, since it contains a desktop CPU - that can be carried from one location to another. The price might seem extravagant, but isn’t actually that bad compared to high-end laptops, and the sheer power and performance that it offers will ensure that it earns its keep – particularly for graphics- intensive tasks. ®
More Notebook Reviews...
Toshiba Satellite A350-12J |
Samsung R522 |
Dell Studio 15 |
Acer Timeline 4810T |
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
Rock Xtreme X790-i7-950
COMMENTS
design course anyone?
That company needs to get hardware designers! No, I do not want a pavement, I want a good looking device. I don't buy Lada cars, because they do not look nice ... can't they come up with something, I don't know, less ordinary .... I mean even cars are getting prettier over the years, look at the recent Jags or Audis ...
Just another CLEVO Clone
Just another piece of CLEVO clone rubbish. In my experience they are noisy, pporly assembly and very unreliable.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/03/hands-off-with-core-i7-packin-clevo-d900f/
http://www.clevo.com.tw/en/products/prodinfo.asp?productid=19#
3->3.3ghz means 2.4->3.0k ?
Why do people pay substantial extras for speed bumps? If a laptop is written off in 3years, then presumably a 600quid price hike over the 2.4k model means waiting 9months longer to replace it --- this will be much much more than a 10% slowdown (as if a 10% speed bump of the processor makes a 10% faster machine).
So what if the faster machine comes with some other better components (typically larger HD, possibly better video card): the same holds --- by the time the HD is anywhere near full, the HD costs half as much for twice the size, so better invest in 2-3 years your 600 saved now.
Or am I just explaining the sweet spot and are all the premium payers corporate w*nkers who get away with it? There's a thought. Phd students and lecturers doing the actual work end up with macbooks and Dells while a huddle of profs are typically 80% titanium macbook pro's, just for mailing and typesetting and presentations.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
