Rock Pegasus 665-T72 review

Matte grey and black aren't colours that usually adorn the fun things in life, such as Lamborghini Murciélagos or the cast of Mamma Mia. So who knows why Rock has chosen to wrap its Pegasus range of multimedia/gaming laptops in a two-tone shade of plastic mediocrity. It's a mis-step that may put buyers off from including the 665-T72 on their shortlist.

If first impressions don't mean that much to you, then the specs of the device will make encouraging reading. The Pegasus comes preinstalled with Windows Vista Home Premium. As such, it's a given that the hardware's up to the job of running the flashy OS, complete with the Aero interface.

The Windows Experience Index - an at-a-glance method of rating your PC's power and the software that it can run - verifies this. It comes up with a value of 4.4, which is good since the maximum current score on the most powerful home machines is 5.9.

If you're an early adopter who's looking out for a PC that can run Vista on the move, then you've come to the right place. All this is possible thanks to the sensible combination of the 2GHz Core 2 Duo chip, the powerful GeForce Go 7600 and the capacious hard drive.

Game on

This brings us back to the machine's leisure roots. The 3DMark benchmark test demonstrated that it can handle fast-paced action games of recent years. Note that until patches are made available, you may experience some incompatibility hiccups with Vista. However, owners of the Pegasus will be well placed once DirectX 10 products become available.

It's a bit of a mixed bag on the multimedia front. For example, the superblack glossy screen is a bit of a letdown. Apart from the distracting reflections, our review model had faint white light bleeding at the top and bottom of the display.

Furthermore, watching video on the Pegasus proved frustrating. There's a definite sweet spot where the viewing experience was unparalleled. Yet moving a fraction either side of the spot resulted in a mish-mash of black lowlights and distorted video. The speakers failed to convey any bass, resulting in the dialogue sounding weedy.

The laptop's chassis puts things back on track. We had no qualms using the light, responsive keyboard, and if you're more of a mouse user the trackpad can be turned off at a press of a button. There's more than a smattering of ports on offer, including DVI and S-Video, three USB2 ports and a 4-in-1 media card reader.

Should you take the Pegasus out for a stroll, bear in mind that 3kg of laptop isn't exactly lightweight, although we're not talking desktop-replacement levels of discomfort. The device did run hot after just a short space of time and we did wonder whether its cooling capabilities were up to the job.

There are more pluses than negatives about the Pegasus. For the money - a not-inconsiderable amount - you'll get your hands on a lot of portable PC power. Yet for a device that's touted as a multimedia platform, its display and sound capabilities are a real disappointment. Pegasus the horse may be the stuff of legends, but Pegasus the laptop falls into the category marked "also ran".