Rock's 7900 GTX-equipped Xtreme CTX Pro is probably the perfect mobile for gamers who don't really want to be all that mobile. Ignoring its vast weight and unwieldy dimensions, the 7900GTX, bolstered by 512MB of GDDR3, pumps the CTX Pro's graphics along superbly.

You see, the 7900 GTX is a gamers' card through and through, and being matched with the CTX Pro's Core 2 Duo and 1GB RAM means some exceptionally quick frame rates and silky smooth gaming playback. Yet that was the CTX Pro in leisure mode. What we have here is the CTX Pro wired for a heavy day's labour.

This version of the CTX Pro sees Rock dispense with Nvidia's 7900GTX in favour of its Quadro FX 2500M - a professional level graphics card that, while still based on the same GPU as the 7900GTX, is geared more towards 3D rendering and graphic applications. Nvidia manages this through its performance driver support, upping the 3D capabilities of the card at the cost of gaming performance.

In terms of architecture, the Quadro FX 2500M is still a 24 pixel-pipeline, 8 vertex-pipeline chip capable of producing 181m vertices per second and filling 10.8bn polygons in the same timeframe. It's still a 500MHz processor, still carries 512MB of onboard RAM, which still fires at 600MHz. That's about the same throughput and outright power of Nvidia's entry-level and midrange desktop cards. In fact, when you take into consideration that the FX 2500M draws 100W of power and that it's capable of HDTV support, its raw specs don't look that far off Nvidia's Quadro FX 4500.

So what performance difference can we expect from the FX 2500M? Let's remember that, superficially at least, this is the same machine as the 7900 model, just with a different graphics engine: a Core 2 Duo T7600 running at 2.33GHz is backed by 2GB of fast 667MHz DDR2 RAM and a 100GB hard drive running at 72,000rpm.

No apologies

Previously we commented on the solidity of such a selection, with Rock making no apologies for its lurch towards an all-out powerhouse of a laptop. And indeed that's precisely what the CTX Pro was and still is - only this time it's aimed at graphics pros rather than gamers.