Rock Xtreme X790

The Rock Xtreme X790 is a decisive gaming laptop that will give you the best quality gaming in high definition as well as suiting business professionals looking for power and performance. The 1GB of dedicated graphics memory is certainly noticeable. Even though Rock claims this to be 'Xtreme', this laptop certainly lacks some of the standard features that sub-£400 laptops include such as a webcam. With a weight of 5.4kg this laptop is certainly not light nor portable and it's obvious that this laptop was designed with performance rather than looks in mind. An all-round workstation pumped by the latest Intel Core i7-930, 2.8GHz, processor. However, its looks are something to look out for and not for the right reasons either. The X790 is in a placid silver-grey with a black trim and looks more like a workhouse than a gaming laptop. For instance look at any of the Alienware range, the M11x for instance, the design is eye-catching and stunning.

Looks? Not a chance!

However, Rock, presumably, in a bid to be different has gone totally in the wrong direction.

Nonetheless, with a 17-inch screen that produces an attractive, bright and sharp picture things start to get better. In addition, to the 17 inch screen and the i7 processor the X790 features a 500GB hard drive, which is large enough to install numerous games, 3GB of RAM, which quite frankly is an outrage considering a number of sub-£400 laptops feature 4GB of RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M graphics card with 1GB of dedicated RAM.

Blu-ray movies? Definitely!

Let us, for a moment, forget about everything else and focus on the graphics card. It alone can cost between £350 and £425, which partly explains the huge price tag of this laptop. Besides handling gaming comfortably even in high detail settings for instance handling Crysis at around 42.2 frames per second in max details at full 1920x1200 resolution.

The graphics card can also transcode your videos ten times faster and doesn’t slow down. It supports, very clearly, Blu-ray movies

On the right hand side of the unit you have four USB 2.0 ports, your optical drive, an eSATA interface, Gigabit Ethernet, four-pin Firewire, ExpressCard slot and a memory card reader. There’s a DVI port on the back, audio jacks on the front and it runs the latest Microsoft Windows 7.

Even though this laptop is a beast, weighing in at under five and a half kilograms, it ran surprisingly quiet but did get particularly hot. However, due to its weight and size it’s not a laptop that would be taken with you on your travels or spend much time on your laptop and neither can it spend much time on your lap without a charger as a result of a mere 90 minute battery life span.