Reviews / Pegasus 710 - What Laptop
» What Laptop says 8/10

In Brief: Plenty of power and features from this well-priced multimedia laptop

The Rock Pegasus 710 (£799 inc. VAT) is a large desktop replacement machine, offering plenty of features for your money. Costs are kept down by the use of a generic chassis, which we·ve seen on previous laptops.
The 710 features a sharp and bright Super-TFT display. Colours appeared slightly more washed out than they did on rival laptops, with blacks looking more like dark grey. We noticed reflections on the glossy panel when used in brighter conditions – which is the downside of such a coating – but it wasn·t a major problem.

The Pegasus features an integrated HD DVD drive, which is surprising at this price. You won·t get the full benefit of true high-definition movies on the Rock·s display, as its 1440 x 900 (WXGA+) pixel resolution isn·t sharp enough, but an HDMI port means you·ll be able to watch movies in their full glory on an external display.

You·ll find an nVidia GeForce 8600M graphics card, the same as that found in the Zepto and Dell machines. It·s the slightly lower GS version, and 3D performance was less impressive. Despite this, the Rock still remains a good choice if gaming or video editing is important, and it handled multimedia tasks with ease.

As a laptop designed with home use in mind, the keyboard is one of the largest in the group. We found it was firmly attached and easy to type quickly on. There·s a dedicated numeric keypad and the main board has not been compromised by it.

Build quality was average, with a thick chassis made from durable plastics. It remained reasonably cool to the touch throughout our testing, even when running intensive tasks. Our review machine was let down by some poorly attached trim, however.

Intel Core 2 Duo
Within the bulky chassis you·ll find a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Although the same chip offers plenty of performance in the Zepto and Lenovo, it·s slightly restricted in the Pegasus due to the use of just 1024MB of memory. Because of this, we found Windows took longer to start, and we also noticed more lag during intensive use. At least you·ll be able to upgrade this in the future, however.

Rock partly redeems itself by fitting plenty of extras in the 710. Wireless networking comes courtesy of the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, and Bluetooth is also built in. This machine also has the best warranty cover in the group, with three years protection as standard. If the laptop does break, the manufacturer will cover the cost of collection, parts and labour.

Despite the lack of memory, the impressive multimedia performance, large features list and great warranty mean the Rock is definitely worth a look.

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