Externals appearance
Opening up by sliding the 2 lid-release locks to the left, we get a view of the keyboard. Rock have made full use of the laptop's near-40cm width by using what amounts to a full-size keyboard, complete with number pad on the right-hand side. The pad is reasonable enough to type upon, however the keys were a little too stiff for my personal liking, and the small space bar does you no favours. The touchpad's buttons, too, are just a little too stiff for comfort.
Rock uses a 17-inch wide-aspect screen on its top-of-the-line DTR model. The resolution's fixed at 1680x1050, which is just about large enough for a screen of this size. The screen also incorporates X-Glass technology, similar to Sony's X-Black. Compared to a non-X-Glass screen, the overall effect is one of brighter, more vibrant colours at the cost of reflectivity. As you can see from the above picture, any external light is conspicuously reflected by the screen, and using it with sunlight bouncing off is a definite no-no. That said, it's hard to ignore the richness that X-Glass conveys, and most users would position the Xtreme Ti to avoid unnecessary reflections. When X-Glass works well, it's impressive. There's also a basic, integrated VGA-capable webcam that actually produces a semi-decent pictures.
Turning over the beasty that incorporates a 5-speaker setup for decent sound, the chassis is designed for easy access and upgradeability.
Looking at the uppermost section first, where the Pentium 4 560 is housed, we see that Rock use a heatpipe approach to cooling. When you consider just how impressive the 27W TDP Pentium M 770 (used in the Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2) is in a wide array of benchmarks, it doesn't make a whole deal of sense to use a 100W+ Pentium 4 Prescott CPU. Rock will counter with the fact that the Xtreme Ti is designed for mains use and battery life is an incidental concern. Sure, we can live with that, but it still takes a whole lot of cooling to keep the Pentium 4 from throttling, and the 5-pipe cooler is more of a necessity than over-engineering.
The above shot shows the bare Pentium 4 560 on top of a i915P chipset. You can see just how much space the cooling apparatus takes up.
A heavy heatsink does its part to boost the laptop's weight to 5.6KG.
