Reviews / Xtreme 770 - Digital Arts
» Digital Arts says 4/5

Big Screen Laptops – Group Test

The Xtreme 770 sits in the middle ground between the truly portable 17-inch laptops – such as the models we’ve looked at here from Apple, HP and Samsung – and the grand leviathans from Sony and Toshiba. It provides an excellent balance between power, price, portability and battery life – though it’s worth waiting for its next upgrade.

Rock’s highest-end laptop has a screen that’s much better than that found on any of the portable models. By default it’s overcranked but after the calibration process, it produced excellent reproduction.

The screen is driven by an nVidia GeForce 7950GTX graphics chip – the most powerful of the older generation of GeForce 7-series chips. High end 8-series chips aren’t available yet for laptops, and the 7950GTX delivers better performance in our Cinebench and Maya real-time 3D tests than the mid-range 8600M GT used by Apple, Sony and Toshiba. However, with 8800M graphics chips due this autumn, it may be worth waiting for Rock to ship an upgrade version of the 770 before investing.

Combining Intel’s fastest mobile processor with a fast hard drive, the Xtreme 770 performed excellently in our After Effects CS3 test – though it was just behind HP’s Compaq 8710w, which has a slower processor but twice as much RAM and a 64 bit OS. The Xtreme 770 was faster in our Photoshop tests than other models with 2GB RAM – helped by the 7200rpm hard drive – but behind those with 4GB.

The design of the Xtreme 770 is clean and simple, with only an orange flash and a silver top breaking the plain black design.

VERDICT

Pros: Excellent screen for size
Cons: Not as portable as models, more powerful graphics chip soon.

Overall 4/5