Group test: Rock Xtreme CTX T2500 laptop

A quick glance at Rock's CTX T2500 shows there’s nothing to really distinguish it from the company’s less expensive models.

The 4.3kg silver-grey chassis features familiar multimedia shortcut buttons and an LCD, while the trackpad and buttons have a four-way direction pad. However, delve deeper and you’ll find some of the latest mobile hardware.

Like three of the other notebooks here, the Rock ships with an Intel Core Duo processor. The T2500 runs at 2GHz and is supported by 1GB of Corsair DDR2-667 memory.

With these two components leading the charge, the Rock achieved the fastest PCmark05 score here and not far off the Sysmark 2004 SE top spot either.

With Nvidia’s 256MB Geforce Go 7900 GTX graphics card inside, the Rock did extremely well in the 3D department too, ranking a close second to the Evesham with a 3Dmark05 score of 8,015.

Like the Evesham Quest Nemesis, its 54.33fps score in Far Cry wasn’t the best here but it is still competent at running games.

Best battery life
Battery life was one of the best, running to two hours, 23 minutes in Mobilemark 05’s productivity test before powering down. Not bad for such a big and powerful notebook.

Another great feature of the Rock is its 17in WSXGA+ screen that operates at a resolution of 1,680 x 1,050. While the overall build of the notebook may look dated, the X-Glass screen is defiantly 21st century, with pin-sharp detail, a good viewing angle and balanced colours throughout.

Keeping things digital, Rock has ditched VGA output in favour of a DVI port and it also has a 7.1 surround-sound output.

The 100GB hard disk seems skimpy compared to others, but there are plenty of connection options to add peripherals and a multiformat DVD writer for archiving data.

There’s also Bullguard anti-virus software and Microsoft Works 8 software to accompany XP Home.

This article is part of a group test of £1,599 laptops.
See also
Evesham Quest Nemesis 
How Vista will affect notebooks.
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