Rock Agenda Si

Elsewhere in these reviews, we've taken a look at the first Pentium 4 notebook. Its rival in the power notebook PC arena is the AMD Athlon 4, itself a relative newcomer to the market.

This new Rock features a 1.2GHz Athlon 4 with 384Mb of memory. Notebooks share some of this memory with the graphics chip for rendering in 3D games and suchlike which means that memory cannot be used for Windows.

This can affect performance but the Agenda Si can easily spare the few measly megabytes for graphics. There's plenty of space for Windows and other programs on the 20Gb hard disk.

Graphics performance tends to be the weakest part of notebook PCs and unfortunately this is not the notebook to buck the trend. The S3 Twister chip is no good for games but it's fine for browsing web pages and sifting emails.

Our benchmarks showed the Rock to be a very good performer in pretty much everything else, but highlighted the fact that the AMD chips do not have the muscle of the Intel equivalents.

The Rock has an integrated floppy disk and DVD-Rom drive. There is enough power to watch movies on the go while you work, although the speakers don't do soundtracks any more justice than the majority of notebook PCs.

The sharp silver looks are certainly very nice although, at 3kg, owners will be pleased that a leather case is supplied. At this price, the 15.1in screen is a bonus and the battery life was about what we'd expect at over two hours.

Connecting to the outside world is easy with the included modem, network and infrared. Windows XP makes setting these up very easy, but the overall shortage of software is a little disappointing.

Apart from a virus scanner there is nothing aside from that supplied as part of Windows.

Price: £1,117 (inc. VAT)

Contact: Rock 0870 990 9090
www.rockdirect.com

Also consider: Hi-Grade M6400
A top-performing brute of a notebook. £1,526 ****.