Battery life and final thoughts
Battery life considerations aren't helped by the use of a desktop CPU whos frequency remained unchanged in mobile mode. The logic behind it is simple. Rock wanted the fastest CPU that it could lay its hands on, as the Quaddra 64 is primarily designed to run best off the mains supply.Screen brightness was adjusted to medium and the laptop was run off a full-charged battery until a low battery alarm was sounded.
The results were actually better than expected. I wonder just how much better it would have been with a rival-matching battery; something along the lines of a 96WHr.
Thoughts
Rock's Quaddra 64 3.7 is another in a long line of excellent desktop-replacement laptops that have come to market this year. Rock's use of a desktop AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor ensures excellent base performance. In fact, there's nothing much to touch it in 2D work. An asking price of £1199+VAT and use of a specific Clevo chassis dictates that the very latest mobile GPU from either NVIDIA or ATI has had to be overlooked. That's a shame, as we've seen just how potent NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go is. The gorgeous 17-inch screen's relatively high native resolution (1440x900), when run with new-ish games, imposes a significant load on the 128MB Mobility RADEON 9700 graphics card. Sure, it's leagues ahead of, say, a GeForce FX Go 5200, but we've been spoilt by just what the latest mobile hardware can do.
Coming back to the screen for a moment, DVDs are a pleasure to watch, augmented by surprisingly good laptop sound, and games are literally in your face. However, an ongoing, annoying worry is just how loud the cumulative sound from the chassis' fans is. They kick-in all too easily, even when watching DVDs, and one would really need to wear headphones when playing games of any sort.
All in all, Rock's Quaddra 64 3.7 is a tasty desktop-replacement laptop that oozes power. An AMD Athlon 64 3700+ makes short work of 2D tasks and a 128MB Mobility RADEON 9700 takes most games in its stride. For the asking price of £1408 (inc. VAT) I'd like to see Rock specify 802.11g Wireless connectivity as standard, and, perhaps, a touch more system RAM. Christmas is just around the corner. Perhaps it's time to ask Santa for something special, courtesy of Rock?.
