All Computing Feeds

HP 2133 Mini-Note

James de Vile — 1210756212

Asus has a lot to answer for.

Its original Eee PC sub-notebook, announced just under a year ago, has leapt off shelves - watched with great interest by a growing number of notebook manufacturers.

One year of development on, we're starting to see these manufacturers' attempts to match the Eee PC's portability, low price point and general loveableness come to fruition.

A few such notebooks have passed largely unnoticed, but none since the original Eee have been greeted with quite such excitement as HP's offering; the Mini-Note.

Not just for kids

The company insists that the Mini-Note has been designed primarily for education, and though we'll accept that as a starting point, we struggle to believe that every design decision was made so that little Eric could do all his homework on the bus and still have room in his bag for his lunch box.

Take the curvaceous magnesium alloy shell, the near full-sized keyboard or the stunning high-resolution glossy screen.

The rock-solid build quality means it’s quite a lot heavier than its rivals – not particularly schoolchild friendly - and aesthetically, it’s a far cry from the creaky white plastic Eee PCs gracing the shelves of Toys R Us or the One Laptop Per Child association’s toy-like XO-1.

It begs to be kept wrapped in microfibre cloth, protected from wayward compasses and pencil sharpeners that may compromise its beauty. Its looks beg comparison with the Macbook Air, and remind us of the form factor we all hoped for from Apple. It’s simply too exquisite – too adult – to have been built for the classroom.

Slow for the UK

In order to bring the product to market as soon as possible, HP has opted to use VIA’s single-core C7-M processor; a processor family as sluggish as it is dated.

The UK seems to have been dealt a poor hand with the Mini-Note; while US buyers can choose from a number of customised editions, our choice is simply ‘Linux’ or ‘Windows Vista’.

For us Brits, there’s very little reason to opt for the latter; the processor is the same paltry 1.2Ghz chip as the Linux version, with no sign of the 1.6Ghz model in the UK.

Slow processor

It’s a huge shame, as while the extra memory and larger six-cell battery of the higher-end UK model does go some way to making up the speed differential, the ‘upgrade’ to Windows Vista is hardly worth paying for.

Vistaon the Mini-Note is like putting Pavarotti behind the wheel of a two-seat convertible; he'll get from A to B, but the extra bloat means he's not the best man for the job.

But that's the thing - it does get from A to B. Having read preliminary reports, we were expecting performance under Vista to be simply ludicrous, with Vista’s interface rendered pixel by pixel.

Downgrade to Windows XP

In reality, in everyday web browsing, working with Microsoft Office 2007 and playing videos, it’s no slower than a low-end Celeron notebook for the same price.

In the US, HP is offering a 'downgrade to Windows XP' option - we presume the word 'downgrade' is only used to keep Microsoft happy, as for all intents and purposes you'll be giving your Mini-Note a new lease of life by switching to Microsoft's older, wiser operating system.

That said, those looking for a real-world example of the Mini-Note’s abilities under Windows Vista will find comfort in the following: What was originally thought to be a suicide mission ended in tremendous satisfaction after we installed Adobe Lightroom and successfully developed a batch of five 8Mbit Canon RAW images with negligible wait time between adjustments.

Great screen

Photographers looking for a mobile digital darkroom should take note; the high resolution screen makes mobile Photoshopping a reality, and with the inclusion of an SD card slot, powered USB socket and a 120GB hard drive as standard, there’s a huge amount more scope for backing up and storing batches of images on the move than with the EeePC’s 20GB SSD.

Similarly, if you’re looking for a sub-notebook in order to do any kind of writing, the search ends here.

While the EeePC had us screwing our hands into claw shapes to type, the Mini-Note’s ‘borderless’ keyboard is a dream to type on. There’s simply no compromise when typing; it feels more natural than many full-size notebooks, with concave keys guiding your fingertips as you glide over them, providing just the right amount of feedback with minimal travel.

And if you need to get that finished document to where it has to go quickly, there’s a very welcome ExpressCard 54 slot on the side of the Mini-Note, just waiting for a 3G wireless internet card.

Not good for video

As a portable media player, however, the Mini-Note falls flat. The 1.2Ghz processor struggles to play full-screen video at anything beneath ‘high performance’ mode, which reduces battery life considerably.

At full speed, and provided you don’t do too much in the background, DivX-encoded movies and QuickTime trailers will play with no noticeable frame rate loss, though YouTube videos are very choppy under Vista due to the processor-intensive Flash decoding required.

It’s worth noting that 'downgrading’ the 1.2Ghz Mini-Note to Windows XP clears up a lot of such issues.

Video is sharp and colourful thanks to the gorgeously-high PPI 1280x768 resolution, glossy display, but don’t expect to take advantage of the Mini-Note’s screen resolution with any high definition content – the VIA Chrome9 graphics chipset simply isn’t powerful enough for anything much higher than 480p.

Battery life a concern

In normal desktop tasks, though, it makes a world of difference, even compared to the EeePC 900’s 9” screen; the extra resolution brings its screen real estate close to those twice the size. It’s not as bright as we’d hoped, and while it’s perfectly viewable, the option for one more step of brightness wouldn’t go amiss in lighter environments.

The stereo speakers flanking the panel are equally worthy, making up for a lack of bass with detail-laden volume that never sounds distorted.

Battery life is perhaps our biggest concern with the Mini-Note; with the processor clocked at half speed and the brightness set to 70% using Vista’s power management options, we were rewarded with just over four hours of battery life from the larger –and heavier - six cell battery.

Hot case

This is fine if you’re browsing the web or writing spreadsheets, but you’ll struggle to play a film full-screen with the processor at half speed, and turning up the power means the Mini-Note will be dead before the credits roll.

Our other concern is heat, though this is evidently a design decision; place the Mini-Note on your lap and you’ll soon know about it. Like Apple’s metal-bodied notebooks, the Mini-Note’s shell is used to dissipate heat, and while it’s certainly no worse than Apple’s Macbook Air, it’s still not quite the cool and comfortable little computer we might have imagined.

Final verdict

When the Eee PC came out, we set aside a little portion of our salaries, awaiting the results of a backlash from other manufacturers.

The HP Mini-Note is firm proof that it’s been worth the wait – it’s a radical step up from the Eee PC in build quality, and despite the inflated asking price, there are few who will disagree after seeing it face to face that the extra hasn’t been put to good use.

It’s just an enormous shame that the 1.6Ghz version won’t be released in the UK, as internally, the slower processor puts it far behind the Eee PC’s Intel processor when it comes to video and multi-tasking.

The UK editions are still very capable sub-notebooks, but as upstanding British citizens, we can’t help but feel a little cheated.

Razer Mako 2.1 THX Speakers

James Rivington — 1210677635

The Razer Mako 2.1 speaker set is absolutely phenomenal.

Without a shadow of a doubt, it's the best looking and best sounding 2.1 desktop system we've ever come across.

And that's high praise indeed, because there are some pretty damn good PC speaker systems out there.

Best speakers ever?

"Imagine the best orgasm you've ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you're still nowhere near it," - Irvine Welsh used that phrase to describe the pleasures of heroin.

But actually, he's got the Razer Mako speakers pretty much nailed, too.

The system comes packing a whopping 300W of total system power, so between the two satellite speakers and the weighty sub, it's an exceptionally potent set-up (the fantastic Acoustic Energy Aego M 2.1 set is only 90W). It also costs an eye-watering £300, so while you're getting a lot of bang for your buck, it's a hell of a lot of money to spend on a 2.1 system.

That price is likely to be the sticking point for a lot of people. But it completely depends on how much you value high-end audio and whether you think it's worth paying extra for.

This product is not for you if you can listen to a small 5W FM radio in your kitchen without feeling the burn of low fidelity. Nor is it for you if you've already got a powerful hi-fi and amplifier system in the room you're planning on putting it in.

Very pricey

So what is it exactly that makes this system so sexy?

With most desktop speakers, the sound gets slightly distorted and muffled because some of the sound waves travel straight to your ears, while other waves bounce off your desk (and other objects) and then hit your eardrums.

The Razer Makos address these desk-bounce and comb-filtering issues by using THX's innovative 'Ground Plane' and 'Slot Speaker' technologies.

THX Ground Plane works by facing the speaker downward and firing sound directly, and exclusively, onto the desk surface. This controls reflections and distributes crisp, room-filling sound with minimal interference from the desktop.

Room to move

This means that to use them properly, each satellite needs some clearance space all the way round. Busy, cluttered desks do not lend themselves at all well to that. But if you clear a space, you'll soon notice the difference.

At the same time, THX's Slot Speaker design is very different from most other speakers out there. Like the name implies, THX Slot Speakers distribute sound from a very narrow opening. This supposedly allows for better control and directionality of the sound image - creating wide, spacious sound stages.

It works too. Because the round nature of the speakers, and the fact that sound comes out all the way round, means no matter where you are in the room, the audio is fantastic. There's none of the 'spot lighting' that you get with most other 2.1 sets.

Bye bye spot-lighting

What this all results in is an incredibly bassy, crisp sound that doesn't degrade as you move around the room - not even behind the speakers themselves. The sub is reassuringly heavy and the overall audio performance is nothing short of fantastic.

As you'd expect from a 300W system, the volume can be cranked up to ear-burstingly loud volumes. And crucially, there's not a hint of distortion to be heard until you really do reach peek (absolutely deafening) volume.

And music isn't only what the Razer Mako speakers are good at. We played a selection of games including Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on the PC, and GTA IV on the PS3. The sound was fantastic and enhanced the gaming experience no end.

Gorgeous control pod

The control pod is also a marvel to behold. It's puck-shaped and curiously connects to the subwoofer using a serial port.

The great thing about it is that it's touch-sensitive, so you glide your finger over its surface to control volume, bass and to switch between two different audio inputs. Levels are displayed using neon-style LEDs on the puck, which looks incredibly cool on your desktop

Final verdict

The verdict here is that this is a breathtakingly brilliant speaker system. Razer's audio scientists co-developed this system with the masterminds at THX. And what they've produced is extraordinary.

The price is steep, yes. But with the extra money, you get extra power and extra quality. And for people who don't have room for a full-blown hi-fi set-up, this offers a perfect, compact option.

The sound these speakers create is smooth, creamy and incredibly hypnotic. For that reason, you've got to hear them to believe it. And if you buy them, there's no way you'll ever want to give them back.

Gigabyte 9600 GT

1210585104

Recently, NVIDIA has gone into manufacturing overdrive, releasing a slew of new graphics cards in a bid to bury the competition.

We've seen the excellent 8800GT arrive, quickly followed by weaker iterations of the same card at lower prices. Now we have the Gigabyte 9600GT, a relatively low-budget graphics card that makes the others in the sub-£200 market all but redundant.

NVIDIA's latest budget graphics card

The gaming performance is on a par with the G92-based 8800GT, dropping a few frames per second here and there, but never enough to really make a difference to the naked eye at standard resolutions.

Of course, if you're driving a very hi-res panel at 2,560 x 1,600 then you're going to have trouble getting smooth framerates at the native resolution, but if you're willing to pay out for such a mammoth screen then you'll be able to afford at least two of these, or the upcoming 9800GTX, to boost performance.

Tramples the competition

Compared to NVIDIA's 8800GS and the awful 8800GT 256MB version - both of which are still retailing at well above the cost of the 9600GT - this card walks all over them.

This is due in no small part to the 512MB of GDDR3 memory, but also because of the new GPU core beating at the heart of the 9600GT.

If you look hard enough you can find these cards retailing for nearer the £100 mark, making this the budget gamer's card of choice at the moment - that is, if they want to get games featuring Vista's new graphics showcase, DirectX 10, working at playable framerates.

Impressive performance

We're finally seeing performance at this price bracket that previously we were having to shell out at least double for barely three months ago. Such is the march of progress in the graphics world of late.

If you're looking at getting hold of a low-price PC gaming rig you can now pick up some real bargains shaped around the 9600GT for around £500, and if you're just looking to upgrade an existing PCI-E machine then you'll be hard pushed to find another way to boost your gaming experience this much for £100.

Sony VAIO TP2

James Stables — 1210156655

Media centres and living room PCs are set to become one of the rising technologies of the next twelve months, and Sony is hoping that its brand new VAIO TP2 media PC will set the standard for the rest of the competition.

Its timing couldn't be better either, because in 2008 more people than ever are waking up to the dream of building a digital home.

The popularity of HD TVs is now firmly established.

And what with faster broadband speeds enabling us to download HD video content for the first time, and with the introduction of video-on-demand services such as BBC iPlayer, media centre PCs are no longer reserved for hardcore enthusiasts who spend most of their hard earned cash on expensive kit.

Powerful innards

The Sony VAIO TP2 may look like a biscuit tin, but under that smooth round exterior lays a veritable computing powerhouse. It has been granted a major upgrade from its iPod styled predecessor the TP1, with faster clock speeds and most importantly the introduction of a Blu-ray drive, bringing Sony's high definition format into the living room.

Sony has included one of the new 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors in the VAIO TP2. This revised Penryn version of Intel’s dual core processor has been lauded for improvements in video processing and decoding, making it perfect for the inclusion in media based PCs.

Inside the case you’ll find 2GB of RAM and also a laptop-style Nvidia 8400M graphics card which gives it enough power to drive video playback, Windows Vista's demanding Aero interface on HDTVs and even some low-end games if you have the desire. There’s also a 500GB hard drive in there for good measure.

HDMI connectivity

Behind a sliding panel in the front of the VAIO TP2 are all the connections and sockets you would expect to find on any PC, with Firewire, SD card, multiple USB, DVI and HDMI ports.

Disappointingly, we were given an early preview model which had no Blu-ray drive fitted. All retail models will have Blu-ray included, and while all the signs look good for quality, there have been reports that Sony has limited the capacity of the HDMI 1.3 ports. That means the TP2 will downgrade fully lossless audio such as Dolby TruHD to Standard or Dolby 5.1 to lower standards.

This will anger some audiophiles, but the truth is that most HDMI 1.3 devices are having issues with lossless audio.

Quiet as a mouse

When building media centre and living room PCs, the cardinal sin is making it so noisy that enjoyment of music and movies is spoiled by the sound of a light aircraft taxiing across the room. Sony has not made this mistake with the VAIO TP2, and it maintains a dignified silence during the most demanding tasks.

So if the TP2 is such a well rounded (excuse the pun) and superbly capable media PC, why shouldn't you just go out and buy one now and spend the rest of you life decaying in front of its mighty entertainment aura?

The price, at a staggering £899, will most likely put off most average home user and stop this from becoming a hit.

The problem with media centre PCs is that they will forever be used as a second PC. Few people would want to have their main PC marching from the office, and invading the sanctuary of the living room. If Sony is to reach outside the existing media PC ownership or rich enthusiasts, they may have missed the mark with the TP2.

Too expensive

For most living room activities such as watching movies and surfing the web, the TP2 is grossly over powered. It's a mighty machine, but media streamers have successfully been freeing music and movies from the office for years, and they don't cost £900. While media PCs are great, you don't need a powerhouse like this to watch and record TV and playback movies.

If you want a Blu-ray device and the ability to listen to music and watch videos from your PC from the comfort of your living room then the obvious answer is to invest in a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox 360.

At £280 a PS3 will save you £615 over the cost of a VAIO TP2, and lets you stream your media from your main PC over your network, surf the net and play Blu-ray discs.

While the TP2 is a work of computing genius, there are few people out there who would spend that much to bring the benefits of a PC into the living room. If you're in the market to replace your main PC with a living room alternative you can't fail with the TP2, otherwise there are plenty of alternatives.

Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch 2.5GHz

1210152009

This month, Apple rolled out updates to both the MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Of the two, the new MacBook Pro offers more talking points; the chips have been replaced, not just sped up, and the trackpad now includes all those lovely Multi-touch gesture controls we first saw on the iPhone and, more recently, the MacBook Air.

Latest processor technology

The processors in the MacBook Pro represent the latest mobile version of the Intel Core 2 Duo range. Gone are Intel's Merom chips, which were the first mobile C2D chips when launched back in 2006.

Replacing them are the smaller, faster Penryn chips, which drop energy consumption down to 35W from the Merom's 44W. While the clock speed has not been bumped up all that much, advances to the circuitry bring better battery life and overall performance.

Meanwhile, the price has stayed the same, though admittedly the Apple Remote is now an optional extra (£15), whereas before it was bundled for free.

Inside the latest Macbook Pro

Compared to the slinky MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro seems like quite a chunky laptop, though it's still less than an inch thick and this 15-inch model weighs just 2.5 kilos.

Three MacBook Pros are available: 15-inch 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 15-inch 2.5GHz and a 17-inch 2.5GHz. Plenty of upgrade options are available at the point of sale, and chief among these options is an upgrade to 2.6GHz chips on either the 15-inch or 17-inch models, and of course more memory, some screen options and bigger drives.

The only hardware upgrade you can make after purchase that doesn't void your warranty is to install more RAM.

All MacBook Pros ship with 2GB of memory (667MHz DDR2) and can expand to 4GB. The entry-level 2.4GHz MacBook Pro, still a very fine workhorse, ships with a 200GB hard drive, up from 120GB, and NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processors with 256MB of video memory.

The 2.5GHz 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pros ship with 512MB of video memory and the same NVIDIA graphics cards.

The Penryn chips can carry a larger L2 cache, circuitry that speeds access to commonly used data, and this has changed. It has dropped to 3MB (from 4MB) on the entry-level 2.4GHz MacBook Pro, while being raised to 6MB on the other two models.

Why the drop occurred is a mystery to us, but the usual benchmark tester in the Mac community seems sure that the drop hasn't affected performance too badly. We didn't review the 2.4GHz MacBook Pro.

Stunning display

The brushed-aluminium finish, optical drive, port allocation, wireless standard (802.11n), and most other specs remain the same. The display options, in contrast, are wider than they have been before. Glossy screens are optional on all the MacBook Pros at no extra cost.

The reflectiveness of these screens is less of an issue than it is on the iMac range, because the glare is easier to reposition with a laptop. We think the colour range is better with the glossies, but we recommend that you visit a store to see both display in action before buying.

The 15-inch MacBook Pros have been available with the more eco-friendly, lower-powered LED backlit screen since the last MacBook Pro update eight months ago, but now the 17-inch models get this option too, though you need to pay extra for it.

Replacing the standard LCD backlit screens (1,680x1,050 pixels) with the 17-inch LED screen (1,920x1,200 pixels)will cost you £60, which seems reasonable to us.

Considering the low price, we recommend getting the LED option if you go for a 17-inch model. The battery life you'll save is the deal-maker, while you can feel warm and fuzzy about having a screen that's also mercury and arsenic-free. LED screens also dim and light very quickly.

Multi-touch magic

The other hardware upgrade of note is the trackpad. Since the advent of Multi-touch gesture commands on the iPhone and iPod touch, it was only a matter of time before the same level of natural command arrived in the Mac laptops.

The MacBook Air was the first Mac to bring in pinch, swipe and rotate gesture commands in addition to the drag and two-finger scroll commands from early pads. Five minutes after firing up iPhoto and playing around with photos, you'll be a natural. The two-finger expand zoom function is incredibly useful.

During web browsing you can use finger gestures to shift a page and move forward between pages, to scroll up and down, to zoom in and out, and to drag elements around. Fantastic. We know that other manufacturers have experimented with this technology, but none has nailed it as well as Apple.

Leopard was launched between this and the last MacBook Pro update. As with the new Apple Keyboard, the Macbook Pro's offering has changed to better serve the new OS.

This beautiful sprung keyboard, which is a work of art in itself, now comes with Exposé, Dashboard, and media-browsing shortcut keys overlaying some of the function keys. All very welcome additions.

Performance boost

The jump up in speed is fantastic. You can feel the greater L2 cache and faster chips kick in right out of the gate, and the MacBook Pro sprints through video and graphics work, thanks to that doubling of video RAM.

We experienced a near 20% increase in our Photoshop radial blur test over last year's 2.2GHz MacBook Pro. Our multiple CPU Cinebench 10 rendering test returned a 5,444 score compared to 4,931 for last year. These are jumps in performance that you can really feel.

Xbench, a benchmarking application that takes a snapshot of general system specs, averaged a score of 122.5. This figure is more than twice the performance of the MacBook Air (49.68), and approaching the latest 2.4GHz 20-inch iMac (146).

These results are not bad at all for a mobile workstation.

Should you wait for updates?

The MacBook Pro feels very responsive in day-to-day use. With a medium-sized photo library imported in, iPhoto opens and browses practically without a pause. Selecting, pinching and rotating images is near-instant, too.

The same is true across all of the iLife apps, and Photoshop is also beautifully swift. Battery life during normal use was 4 hours 34 minutes, and 3 hours 2 minutes during a flat-out DVD playback burn.

A question we often get asked is whether now is the right time to buy a Mac, or whether it's worth waiting for more power down the line. It took eight months for this update to arrive.

The Penryn chips started shipping in January 2008 and at the time of writing had yet to be updated with faster Front Side Bus, the next logical step that would prompt an upgrade.

Considering that Apple typically updates its Macs three months after better chips become available, and given that the old excuse of waiting for Leopard is no longer relevant, we recommend buying now.

The fact of the matter is, the sooner you are able to start enjoying your Apple laptop the better.

Parrot DS1120 Bluetooth Speakers

James Rivington — 1210074894

It’s sometimes very hard to review a pair of low-end speakers. Weighing functionality against audio fidelity is an almost impossible task. And yet that’s what we’re having to do with the Parrot DS1120s.

On the one hand you’ve got a pair of speakers that barely scrape together 30W of power between them. On the other, you’ve got the convenience of being able to synchronize them with any Bluetooth media player in order to playback music. It’s a hard call to make.

So let’s get this out of the way right off the bat - the Parrot DS1120 speakers don’t sound great. If you’re used to a 500W hi-fi set-up in your living room, these are going to sound absolutely terrible. However, it’s all relative. And so if you’re more used to the small speakers on your digital radio or the stereo in the kitchen, these will sound pretty cool.

Swings and roundabouts

So now we’ve got that cleared up, we can move on to the DS1120’s main functionality – Bluetooth streaming. You can pair them with your phone, or your PC or even your MP3 player as long as it’s got built-in Bluetooth connectivity.

And as you’d expect from a Parrot product, it works pretty well, too. To test we used a Sony Ericsson K850i mobile phone. We tapped the Bluetooth button on the side of one of the speakers, and then ran a search on the phone, and the Parrot speakers appeared immediately. A quick tap of the ‘pair’ button later and the devices were all synched up and ready to go.

From then on, any music played on the phone is streamed directly to the speakers. And considering the small size and the low-power of the speakers, they don’t sound too bad. It’s all squashed into the midrange, there’s not much bass and the high-range cymbals are severely blunted, but in general the audio is clear and undistorted at low volumes.

Freedom of movement

One of the cool things about these speakers is that they aren’t tied together. You can plug them into different power sockets at different ends of the room and yet they’ll still synch up with each other and your device. That way you can create a bigger soundstage than your radio ever could.

The set also has a 3.5mm line-in port so you can plug a device directly into them (like your TV for instance) if your audio device doesn’t have Bluetooth.

So we’ve covered quality. And we’ve done functionality. So what about price? The price is where it all comes tumbling down, unfortunately. Because while these speakers are pretty cool, the £160 asking price seems rather steep.

Very expensive

For instance, you could buy a set of the brilliant Acoustic Energy Aego-M 2.1 speakers for £120. Those speakers leave the Parrots trailing far behind in the dust in terms of audio fidelity, and also have a total output (including subwoofer) of 90W – that’s three times the power of the Parrot DS1120.

So really, these speakers are only for you if Bluetooth compatibility is what you need as a primary concern. If you’ve got loads of music on your phone and you’d like to be able to listen in the kitchen without plugging anything in, these are for you.

However, if you’ve got a good ear and can tell when music is sounding a bit rubbish, and if Bluetooth isn’t the main concern, you should navigate a wide berth and go for something else (those Aego-M’s are highly recommended).

All in all then, not a bad product. But the price will keep these speakers from going mass market. Especially considering the fact that as audio devices, they’re pretty poor.

MSI X48 Platinum

Tech staff — 1210001580

Intel has a nasty habit of killing off relatively new chipsets and leaving buyers in the lurch.

So it was with the X48 chipset, which appeared within months of the X38. Given that the X48 is largely the same silicon, we can't quite fathom why Intel didn't make a single release that combined the features of both.

Gaming prowess

Nevertheless, the X48 is certainly offers comprehensive support for the very latest Intel 45nm chips.

That includes the near-mythical Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and its currently unique 1,600MHz front side bus. Of course, the X48 also supports Intel's CrossFire multi-GPU graphics technology, making it the obvious foil to NVIDIA's latest 790i SLI mobos.

In general performance terms and overclocking prowess, there is little to choose between the two.

Toshiba Satellite P200-1K9

Tech staff — 1210000500

The Toshiba Satellite P200-1K9 (£899 inc. VAT) is a capable multimedia laptop.

It may not be particularly portable, but has improved gaming power.

Fantastic usability

The 3.5kg chassis is the large and heavy, due to its 17-inch screen. The 131-minute battery life provides basic mobility for short journeys and use around the home.

The glossy design adds style, but is more prone to damage than tougher matt finishes.

Usability is outstanding, as the large chassis allows an equally spacious keyboard. All keys have a smooth typing action and long-term use is comfortable.

A separate pad of numeric keys is also included for gaming and data input.

Great HD video playback

The screen is bright and vibrant. Photos, videos and games look stunning and the extra screen space is ideal for watching DVDs from your sofa. An infrared remote control is included to improve accessibility.

While many laptops provide poor audio quality, Toshiba has fitted a set of stereo speakers from audio specialist Harman Kardon.

Sound quality is certainly improved over its rivals, but still fails to match the use of dedicated external speakers.

Where the Toshiba excels is its gaming performance. The high-definition (HD) compatible ATi graphics card provides smooth playback of HD videos and the latest games run with ease.

Photo and video-editing power is also flawless.

Impressive memory

Home and office performance is also. The Intel Core 2 Duo is backed by an impressive 3072MB of memory.

This lets you smoothly and effortlessly run multiple high-performance applications side-by-side without a drop in performance.

Storage space is capacious. The 240GB hard drive will easily hold a whole family's files and the built-in DVD rewriter lets you create your own CDs and DVDs. There is also a 6-in-1 card reader.

Well-connected

Connectivity is equally comprehensive. While most rivals have four USB ports or less, the Toshiba has six.

This makes it easy to have a range of peripherals simultaneously connected. An HDMI-out port is also fitted for connecting the laptop to external HDTVs.

While its weight and battery mean it isn't the best choice for travellers, it's hard to fault the Toshiba for home gaming and multimedia use.

Its style, usability and high performance are impressive for such a low price and the Satellite P200-1K9 is easy to recommend.

Asus Striker II Extreme

Tech staff — 1209915060

Some of NVIDIA's recent mobo chipsets haven't been that clever.

The nForce 780i is a case in point. Despite the 7 Series moniker, it was little more than a rehash of the 680i chipset with PCI Express 2.0 unconvincingly glued on.

An enticing package

The 780i also carried over the 680i's hot-running silicon. The result was pants overclocking, particularly for a high-end chipset. But that's all history with the 790i.

Its C73 northbridge packs native PCI-e 2.0, runs much cooler, while overclocking headroom is much improved.

As for Asus' take on the 790i, it's the total solution, complete with triple-way SLI support, exceptionally high-quality digital audio and a northbridge heatsink that comes pre-plumbed for water cooling.

Nice, but just look at the price!

Dell Latitude D830

Tech staff — 1209914040

Dell's corporate Latitude range combines business stability with high-street prices.

The Latitude D830 (£660 inc. VAT) is a highly usable system with a great warranty, but low performance lets it down slightly.

Impressive battery life

The plain black/silver chassis is unobtrusive and ideal for corporate use. While it's quite a large laptop, its 3kg weight is light enough for basic mobility.

The 398-minute battery life is impressive and even outlasts that of the MacBook.

The user interface provides excellent comfort and freedom of choice. The keyboard is large with a near flawless typing action.

Both a touchpad and pointing stick are fitted for onscreen navigation, so users can choose their preferred method of control.

Bright screen

The 15.4-inch screen is bright and sharp, but the use of a standard TFT panel rather than a glossy Super-TFT coating means colours aren't as vibrant as we'd like. It reduces reflections, however, so you can comfortably work outside or under bright lights.

Graphics performance using the integrated Intel GPU is low, but suits basic use. Multimedia presentations can be created with ease and you can edit photos, but anything more than basic gaming is out of the question.

Limited performance

General performance on home or office tasks proved average.

The 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2048MB of memory let you multi-task in comfort, but far better performance is available from rivals.

Recognising the need for corporate stability and hardware/software compatibility, Dell has installed Windows XP rather than Vista, as it is currently regarded as the more stable operating system. Vista can be installed later if you require its more advanced features.

Storage options are limited. The 120GB hard drive suits basic use, but is rather small at this price point. The dual-format DVD rewriter lets you create CDs and DVDs, but there is no support for media card formats.

Dell's superb warranty

Where the Dell excels is its outstanding warranty.

Three-years of on-site repairs are provided, with service guaranteed for the next business day. This will be a key selling point for home and business users alike and is a great addition at this price.

With its excellent battery life and warranty, the Dell Latitude D830 is a real bargain.

Its average performance and storage won't suit power users, but the fantastic user interface, stable platform and excellent battery life make this a laptop that's hard to ignore.