Final thoughts
Final thoughts
rock's premise in designing the Pegasus 330 was to release a thin-and-light laptop that had all the important areas covered. Our sample, priced at £888 inc. VAT, was outfitted with a Yonah T2300 CPU, 512MBytes of DDR2 RAM, an 80GB hard drive, PCIe Gigabit LAN, and multiformat DVD ReWriter. A further £117 (£997 inc. VAT) boosts specs. to a Centrino Duo T2400 CPU and 1GByte system memory, which is probably the better option if your budget extends that far.What we liked is rock continuing its performance-enhancing theme by adding in a 5% mains-powered CPU overclock via an option in the BIOS. Further good was to be found with a bundled DVB-T USB stick for receiving Freeview, and rock's deal with Vodafone, which sees a 3G/GPRS PCMCIA card bundled in with the laptop. The svelte chassis carried the usual ports we associate with smaller laptops, and the screen, a generous 13.1-inch WXGA model, was clear, vibrant and easy to read. rock's Silent Mode is also a positive, as it allows for fan-free running and, under basic load, a battery runtime of over 3 hours.
Performance was also good in our batch of multi-threaded tests, and the laptop's fan-noise was barely noticeable, so there's a lot of positive points here. Build quality on the 2.1kg laptop was generally good, but we had issues with overly stiff buttons and a keyboard that wasn't the most comfortable for extended typing. Being picky, other manufacturers have been able to design thin-and-light laptops with discrete graphics cards that make them suitable for gaming; the Pegasus 330's integrated graphics, however, will struggle with anything more taxing than Minesweeper. Being a laptop that's vying for business man's attention, we'd also like to see Bluetooth integrated as standard.
Our overall thoughts on the rock Pegasus 330 are positive, though. Intel's Napa platform is an excellent base on which to design a thin-and-light laptop around, and sensible choices in other components ensures that the Pegasus 330 offers reasonable value for money.
A decent, well-specced laptop that should be on your shortlist if a thin-and-light Centrino Duo laptop meets your needs. 7/10
