The world of performance laptops has always been an interesting one; we first looked at a “gamer” laptop in February 2004 and saw that speed didn’t necessarily mean portability. The 3.0Ghz P4 and Radeon 9600 Pro in that system required a rather large, and heavy, chassis and so really limited your travel options. Since then the majority of manufacturers have been forced to follow suit and generally if you want a top performing system you really do need to buy big. However this is slowly changing with the release of Intel’s Core CPU’s and some tough competition in the mobility graphics segment with ATI and Nvidia trying to outdo each other in terms of speed, temperature and power requirements. The result is that system builders can fit top performing kit into their laptops whilst for the most part maintaining portability.

We have one such system in for review today, it’s Rock’s Xtreme CTX which comes with the excellent Core Duo 2.16Ghz CPU and the high spec ATI Mobility X1800 XT graphics chip.