Reviews / Pegasus 670 - Digital Arts
» Digital Arts says 3/5

15.4 inch laptop Pegasus 670

Arriving too late for last month’s laptop group test, the Pegasus 670 is an intriguing mix of power and portability – though the model supplied to us by Rock is a little underwhelming.

The Pegasus seems lighter than you’d expect from a 3kg laptop, and its curves make it smaller than its quoted size suggests. The laptop’s design is plain matte black, with a glossy central section around the keyboard. It looks good from a distance, but poor finishing spoils this when you get up close.
This laptop’s Cinebench R10 rendering score of 4,507 is good for a model with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 processor – though behind the Dell Precision M4300 in our group test. It’s also a lot slower than the score produced by Zoostorm’s 3384-6639, which as a 2.8GHz T7800 chip.

The 670’s scores in After Effects and Photoshop were very poor – taking almost twice as long as laptops with the same chip. This is because it has only a single GB of RAM, while most models for creative pros have at least 2GB, if not the 4GB maximum.

The price difference between 1GB and 2GB of RAM isn’t all that great, but the performance variation is significant. Delivering a real-time Cinebench score of under 3,000, the Pegasus 670’s nVidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics chip is a weak addition. It doesn’t drain much power compared to higher-end chips, though, helping the 670 attain a lengthy battery life of 184 minutes – which was only beaten last month by the HP Compaq 8510w mobile workstation.

The 670 has a great 1,680-x-1,050 screen and a large 160GB hard drive, but you’d need to add at least another gigabyte of RAM before using it for pro-level creative applications.

Verdict:
3/5

Pros: Powerful processor; excellent screen; large hard drive; long battery life
Cons: Limited RAM reduces performance dramatically; poor finish on design; weak graphics chip.