rockdirect Xtreme SL: Dual graphics card monster

By Rory Reid on 03 April 2006, 11:16am

A laptop is a PC you can use while it's perched on your lap, right? Wrong. If you're stupid enough to try that with the 6.5kg rockdirect Xtreme SL, you'll be permanently pinned to your chair.

It's part of a new army of laptops featuring 19-inch screens, and it's absolutely enormous. It's also one of the very first laptops to use not one, but two Nvidia Geforce Go 7800 GTX graphics cards in a Serial Link Interface (SLI ) configuration. That means it'll play games fast. Very, very fast.

We were slightly miffed that the huge screen has a native resolution of only 1,680x1,050 pixels (we'd have liked 1,600x1,200), and a tad nonplussed by the laptop's comparatively tame AMD Turion 64 ML-42 mobile processor -- especially given rockdirect's usual love for for full-on desktop CPUs, but our initial impressions of the Xtreme SL are still positive.

It has five USB ports, a huge keyboard with a dedicated number pad, a memory card reader, a slew of shortcut buttons, Bluetooth support, a 1.3-megapixel camera, an 8x DVD rewriter and a TV tuner.

It's not cheap -- our review sample costs about £2,348 -- but if you want your games to look absolutely gorgeous and can't tolerate low frame rates, look no further. We'll have a full review shortly. -RR