The screen and a look inside
Opening the laptop by sliding the two latches shows just how expansive it is. The touchpad is smooth enough but the buttons underneath are a little stiffer than we'd like. The ample room on each side allows you to rest your forearms and palms in reasonable comfort, and a full-size keyboard, which includes a number-pad on the right-hand side, is fairly easy to type upon, thanks to key travel which, subjectively, is just right. Under prolonged load, however, the laptop does become very warm, and that heat is transferred to the keys and chassis. Great in winter but a real pain in summer.
The power button, ringed with a funky blue glow, is situated to the right of three hotkeys which control, by default, your email program, internet browser, and a user-specified application, usually Windows Media Player. A number of LED status indicators are highlighted further to the left.
3 LEDs highlight mains power, battery power, and WiFi/Bluetooth activity. There's also a built-in microphone to the left. The 17-inch wide-aspect screen ships with a standard WSXGA+ resolution, that is, 1680x1050 pixels. Users can upgrade to a WUXGA panel (1920x1200) for an additional £100 excluding VAT. Both screens feature X-Glass technology that provides for a brighter, sharper picture at the cost of extra reflectiveness. Compare, say, an X-Glass screen with a standard model and the former will look more vibrant and colourful. Do the same test with light reflecting on to the screens and the X-Glass screen will be more difficult to see. You pays your money and takes your choice. No real complaints against the screen unless you work in an environment where reflective light is an issue. Common to Clevo D900K chassis is an integrated 1.3MP webcam that's adequate for pictures and video when there's ample surrounding light.
A number of vents and fans line the bottom, just as you would expect from a laptop that can consume around 200W in full-blown mains-powered mode.
Stripping away the covers shows what lies beneath. The upper left-hand side is home to the graphics card that has its own fan pre-attached to it. Hardware-wise, swapping the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB PCIe to the 7800 GTX Go is simply a matter of unscrewing and replacing. Right next door is space for the hard drives, which, on this occasion, are 2 100GB 7,200RPM models from Hitachi, arranged in non-RAID format. Rockdirect, however, also offers the buyer the option of pre-configuring them in either RAID0 (speed) or RAID1 (security) flavours at no extra cost.
The central section uses a cover with a pre-installed fan. System memory, in this case 2 1GByte of Corsair Select DDR400 SODIMMs are installed and run in dual-channel mode.
Lastly, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU is situated at the bottom and cooled by the same heatpipe-based heatsink found on other Clevo D900K/T models. The two fans directly above the CPU help exhaust the heat transferred to the cooler. Note that tampering with the CPU and graphics card will invalidate the warranty on the laptop as they're not a user-serviceable parts.
Bundle and software
Shipping with Microsoft Windows XP Home as standard, Rockdirect adds in Microsoft Works 8, Roxio's Easy Media Creator 7, Bullguard Anti-Virus, a driver disk for the 1.3MP webcam and another for the various device drivers. The main manual is presented in electronic format and is a decent reference point. The laptop hard drive's are divided into three partitions. The third partition, by far the smallest, is used to house Rockdirect's excellent recovery software that reconfigures the Windows XP Home install to factory specifications. Simply press F10 during the booting sequence (clearly marked before the laptops boots into Windows XP) and you can have a factory-fresh install in minutes. Rockdirect also throw in a basic bag that doesn't provide much protection should you drop it with laptop inside.
Noise and heat
The upshot of having to cool a machine that uses a desktop CPU and high-end parts is the need for multiple small fans which, when the laptop is under full mains-powered load, combine to make the Rockdirect Xtreme 64 a noisy laptop by any stretch of the imagination. Users looking for a better balance between quietness and power would be advised to consider a Pentium M or Turion-based laptop. Leading on from this is a heat-related issue that's hard to avoid. Again, under full load the laptop's chassis becomes pretty warm to the touch. We'd not recommend having it on your lap for any length of time. Most users, though, will have it placed on a desk from which it will rarely be moved, we reckon.
Warranty
Rock offers a 3-year collect-and-return warranty that includes parts and labour cover as standard. Support is handled by the folks at mobile support, presumably a division of Rockdirect as they're situated at the same address in Warwickshire and are contactable by either via email or by an 0871 national-rate number. Rockdirect doesn't offer any service upgrades on the standard collect-and-return warranty, though, but it is backed up by insurance such that in the unlikely event Rockdirect ceased trading within the warranty period, a third-party would continue to fulfill support.
Overall impressions
Build quality was decent throughout, with no squeaks or rattles. £2466 (with GeForce Go 7800 GTX) is a hell of a lot of money for a laptop and we'd expect only the finest componentry to be used. Rockdirect's scary specification is enough to make most desktop's green with envy and whilst it's difficult to recommend shelling out this kind of cash on a single machine, there's not much more it can add to the package, hardware-wise, to make it sweeter.
Our primary concern, however, is the sheer weight and size of the Xtreme 64. Dell, for example, has managed to design its Inspiron XPS M170 high-end laptop with much of the same parts (albeit with a Pentium M CPU instead of a dual-core Athlon 64 X2) and kept the weight down to under 3.9kg, which is over 30% lighter than Rockdirect's.
