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Reviews / Pegasus 665 - Computer Buyer

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The Pegasus 665 attempts to harness the power of Intel·s Core 2 Duo processor

The rock Pegasus 665 T2700 is a fairly plain looking laptop on the outside, with its low-key black finish and rounded-styling. It’s unremarkable looks belie the power on offer though, and while the 2GHz processor may not be the top-end Core 2 model it still offers tremendous performance. To demonstrate its dominance over our benchmarks it scored a hefty 139%, which is very fast for a laptop. Despite this level of performance its not a burden to carry around, weighing a reasonable 3.1kg.

Solid as a rock
The Pegasus 665 is a well-built laptop and its strong lid provides plenty of protection for the screen. Computer buyer readers will also receive a free carry case with their purchase and while it’s a fairly no-frills offering, at least it’ll afford the Pegasus plenty of protection on your travels.

Inside the system, you’ll find whopping 120GB hard disk for your storage needs. It spins at 5400rpm, which is quite normal for laptop hard disks, but you can choose to have a smaller 100GB disk, which spins at 7200rpm if you value the slight performance boost over the extra storage space. There’s also a DVD-writer that will burn disks at 8x, which offers a handy way to back up your hard disk.

The screen itself is of the glossy variety, which tends to divide opinion between those who love its vibrancy and those who loathe the reflectivity, but it does give a nice bright image. It has a resolution of 1280 x 800, and gamers will appreciate the 256MB nVidia Geforce 7600 Go graphics chip, which helped the Pegasus achieve a highly respectable 63% in our Call of Duty gaming benchmark.

Baked to the Core
Fast as it is, the graphics set up also poses a problem with rock, as we found it ran extremely hit during intensive use, sometimes to the point where you certainly wouldn’t want it on your lap. Propping up the back end by a few millimetres to air the underside largely solved the problem, but it’s still a concern. If you’re not working intensively, one option is to engage the quiet mode, which clocks performance down to such a level that fan-cooling is no longer required –but this problem shouldn’t occur at all

Out of Puff
Apart from keeping the laptop cool the point of quiet mode is supposedly that it uses less energy, conserving battery life. We tested this using our DVD run-down benchmark, which we ran once in quiet mode and once in normal mode. In normal mode the battery lasted 1 hour and 27 minutes, in quiet mode thirteen minutes longer –not much to shout about. In our normal light use test the battery charge lasted a respectable, if not amazing, two hours. However, it then took eight hours to recharge. This is decidedly poor compared to other laptops we’ve seen.

On a happier note, the rock has every port and connector you could want for hooking up to other hardware: DVI and S-Video; three USB ports; a 4-in-1 media card reader and ExpressCard slot. There’s also mini-FireWire for connecting a DV camera, plus a gigabit Ethernet port.

But the best part of the Pegasus 665 T7200 is the price. Last month’s Hi-Grade laptop featured T5500, a lesser graphics processor and smaller hard disk, yet it cost £899. The rock offers better performance in both 2D and 3D applications and includes a free carry case for just £999.


© 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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