Rock Xtreme 64

Big and ugly, but a truly powerful notebook

As we've seen with the Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi, Intel's Centrino Duo platform is allowing notebooks to stay relatively small and light while boosting system speeds without a detrimental effect on battery life.

However, while the Rock Xtreme 64 is a powerful dual-core notebook, it shuns aesthetics and battery life in favour of desktop replacement styling that defines the term gargantuan.

This is an absolute beast of a notebook; big enough to house a 17in display, full-size keyboard with number pad and stereo speakers either side.

The Clevo-design chassis is even thick enough (5cm) to host a double layer DVD writer and a spare drive bay underneath.

Unsurprisingly, it's rather hefty - 6kg in fact, and not something you'd want to carry more than a couple of yards.

Inside sits an AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Processor 4800+, which is usually reserved for desktops. There's also 1GB of Ram and two separate 100GB hard disks.

Needless to say, it's fast. The score of 221 in Sysmark 2004 SE puts it right up there with the quickest performing notebooks we've seen.

Full performance results can be found here.

Its speed, and subsequent heat generated, requires five fans to cool it down, which can cause quite a racket at times. You can see one of the fan outles by taking a look at our image gallery.

The 256MB Nvidia Geforce Go 7800 GTX graphics chipset churned out fantastic results of 6,720 in 3Dmark05.

Thanks to the screen's native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050, the Xtreme 64 can make full use this graphics power.

As expected, a huge collection of ports and sockets are found dotted around the edge of the chassis.

These include four USB2, two mini Firewire, DVI, video inputs and surround sound outputs. There's also a small webcam integrated into the lid, 802.11g Wifi, and a sub-woofer underneath, which complements the four speakers around the case.

The Rock Xtreme 64 is built like a heavyweight boxer and will easily take a few knocks on the chin before going down. However, its bruising looks mean the fashion conscious will be instantly put off.

At £2,232, it's not cheap. But if you're happy to forsake looks and portability, it's a true powerhouse.

Hear more about the Rock Xtreme 64 in our Product of the Week pocast and take a closer look at it in our image gallery.