Details:
Price: £1609
Verdict:
A rocket-powered and reliable performer – with a price tag to match. 8/10
CPU: Intel Core i7-2860QM (2.5GHz, 8Mb cache)
RAM: 6GB
GRAPHICS: ATi HD6990M
HARD DRIVE: 750GB SATA II
SCREEN: 15.6″ (1920×1080) X-Glass LED Backlit
EXTRAS: 3-year warranty, collect and return
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
Web: Rock
A personal preference, laptops don’t even get off the starting block when we’re considering a machine dedicated to leisure and gaming. Without talking about future-proofing and customisation, anyone looking for a portable equivalent of a high-end gaming desktop can add around a £500 premium to the required budget. But the choice that portable gaming brings is a worthwhile one for some – so this is what a rather luxurious £1700 investment can buy you.
The Xtreme 685 is at the high end of this particular range of Rock laptops, distinguished from its nearest cousin, the Xtreme 786, by its Ati-powered graphics card and around a £100 price difference. It’s sturdy enough – the chassis feels quite solid and the keyboard has a chunky desktop tactility with broad, satisfyingly mechanical keys. But it’s a fairly vanilla-looking creature with its plain black lacquer finish and clumsy power brick attachment. So it’s as well that we don’t put that much stock in shiny bezels and faux brushed aluminium, especially not when underneath the hood of the Rock Xtreme 685 is more horse-power than Apollo 13 and all its boosters.
A very respectable quad-core i7 mobile 2860QM lies at the heart of the particular model we reviewed (the Xtreme range is customisable on the Rock website), that rockets up from 2.5GHz while idling to around 3.6GHz in turbo mode. It’s backed-up by a more-than adequate 6GB of triple-channel RAM and a 750GB conventional drive that should furnish most gamers’ storage needs. Plus, the 15.6-inch, full HD screen is incredibly sharp, even if the viewing angles are a little tight.
But the royal sapphire in the Xtreme 685′s crown is the graphics card: the Radeon 6990M is the most powerful graphics card on the planet and is a major contributor to the Xtreme 685 leaving the average desktop solution eating its dust. Battlefield 3, DiRT 3, World In Conflict: benchmarking was academic really, because a monster performance seemed obvious. The Xtreme 685 cranked out between 50-60 frames per second average, dropping to a remarkably high minimum of 31 only under extreme benchmark stress.
The Rock Xtreme 685 expensive, a little pricier than we’d expect on paper but with Rock-solid performances like this, the extra outlay could be worth it.
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