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Reviews / Pegasus 710 - PCW

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Rock Pegasus 710

Our Pegasus 710 review unit came with a Core 2 Duo T7500 but Rock says it will ship with a T8300 imminently, based on Penryn architecture. It runs 200MHz faster than the T7500, and has 3MB L2 cache, rather than 4MB on the T7500.
On balance, performance will be almost identical since less cache affects heavily multi-threaded programs like Cinebench, but the higher clock speed will improve performance in office applications.

Combined with 2GB of Ram and a Geforce 8600M GS (which is a tad slower than 8600M GT·s) it performed reasonably across our benchmarks. In our usability tests we discovered an annoying flaw with the keyboard: it·s large and quiet but the spacebar sits behind a chassis ridge which our thumbs continually hit.
At 1,440x900, the screen·s resolution is a fraction low for a 17in LCD and we thought it looked dull in our subjective tests, borne out by it coming last when we measured brightness with the Spyder3Elite calibrator.

The Pegasus 710·s solid chassis comes with a decent array of ports, a card reader, Draft-N Wifi and Bluetooth. Four USB ports are placed around the rear-right corner, which makes them less accessible than most other notebooks. They come in two stacks, which means if you use thick peripherals, such as a USB TV tuner, you·re liable to block one port.

Like Acer, Rock includes an HD DVD drive, which can·t write to HD DVDs but can to DVDs. We·re nonplussed about the HD DVD drive in the Pegasus 710.

Toshiba announced it was discontinuing standalone HD DVD players for the home, but is still undecided on what to do with HD DVD drives in laptops and PCs. For now the standard isn·t going to dissapear in the PC space.

The Pegasus 710·s three-year warranty is impressive, but the dim screen won·t be pleasant to use on a daily basis.

RESULTS
3 / 5


© rockdirect 2010 | Descriptions and prices subject to change without notice. | | |
rock, A Division of Stone Computers Ltd, Granite One Hundred, Acton Gate, Stafford, Staffordshire, ST18 9AA
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