Evesham’s Voyager C720 is the first notebook we’ve seen that uses the mobile version of Nvidia’s Geforce 7800 GTX graphics card – arguably the fastest graphics adapter on the market.

Obviously there are several hurdles in transplanting the desktop part to a notebook PC, but remarkably the Geforce Go 7800 GTX hasn’t lost much in the transition. It still uses eight vertex shaders and 24 pixel shader pipelines – just like its big brother.

The only real compromise is its clock speeds. The full desktop part has a GPU and memory clocked at 430MHz and 1,200MHz respectively, whereas the mobile edition’s components run at 400MHz and 1,100MHz – much like the desktop Geforce 7800 GT.

The Voyager C720 uses a 17in widescreen display. Unfortunately the screen has a native resolution of just 1,440 x 900, so it can’t fully exploit the performance of the graphics card. Evesham sells a version of the Voyager C720 with a 1,680 x 1,050 display, but this costs over £200 more.

Despite its comparatively limited resolution, the Voyager C720’s gaming performance is the highest we’ve ever seen in a notebook. It achieved a 3Dmark05 score of 6,833 and ran Far Cry at 70 frames per second.

Performance in everyday applications wasn’t quite as mind-boggling. The 2.1GHz processor and 1GB of DDR memory helped it achieve 180 in our Sysmark 2004 SE tests, which is on par with other similarly equipped Centrino notebooks.

Importantly for a desktop replacement system, the Voyager C720 has a very comfortable keyboard with a dedicated numeric keypad, but unfortunately the mouse touchpad is unresponsive at times.

This is the fastest gaming notebook available. It isn’t as attractive as the Dell Inspiron XPS II, but if you want uncompromising 3D performance it’s an excellent choice.