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Reviews / Pegasus 710 - Computing Made Easy
» Computing Made Easy says 7/10

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Rock Pegasus 710 £749 - A widescreen laptop with great graphics

Rock is renowned for producing high quality notebooks and the 710 series marks another impressive range. Our review model resides at the bottom end of the range but still provides plenty of power.

Aesthetically the 710 is not the most inspired unit we have seen, its design being more functional than fancy. It is decked in the most obligatory black with silver making an appearance as the lid is opened. Turning on the unit reveals the 17” widescreen display powered by the impressive 512MB nVidia GeForce 8600M GS graphics chipset. The display has a maximum resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels which gives bright, sharp graphics and good colour reproduction. The chipset is about as good as it gets in this price bracket. It will give stutter-free, smooth video playback, real-time photo-editing and breeze through the latest PC games.

Powering the Rock is a top of the range mobile Core 2 Duo in the shape of the T8100 running at 2.1GHz. This is more than capable of scorching through the most intensive tasks with ease. However, accompanying the processor is a mere 1GB of memory. An additional 1GB of memory would have been a better choice, especially with the top specs already assigned to the machine. This said, the next model in the range, the P710-T8300, does boast a slightly faster processor and 2GB of RAM for an additional £50.

Storage is provided by a spacious 160GB hard drive which will provide plenty of space for programs, music and photos and a decent-sized video collection. The keyboard is very much standard laptop fare, though we felt the keys lacked a little feedback and the typing angle was a little high. The touchpad fared better and was a joy to use being smooth and accurate. The audio is again very much the laptop standard, perfectly adequate for video playback, but lacked any substance when playing music. Connectivity was well catered for across the board with four USB ports placed on the right and back, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, an HDMI port for future-proofing and a DVI port for connecting external digital monitors.

Finally, the Rock Pegasus also offers a 1.3 megapixel webcam, an ExpressCard slot a 8x Dual layer DVD writer and integrated card reader with support for the major formats.

RESULTS

The P710 packs a powerful set of specs but lacks in the memory department. Paying the extra £50 for the T8300 is a better option.

7/10



© 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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