Rock Xtreme XSL8-9550 gaming notebook

The Xtreme family is Rock’s high-end gaming notebook range, the flagship of which is the XLS8-9550, a blisteringly fast SLI-configured desktop replacement notebook.

It’s a big beast, measuring 394x299x60mm (wxdxh) and weighing a hefty 6kg, including the large power brick; you’ll only think it is portable if you’re used to lugging around a desktop PC and monitor to Lan parties.

In fact, the Clevo chassis is so big, not only does it have two graphics cards in it, it also has three hard drives.

The gloss black finish is set off by a brushed metal panel set into the lid with a large X inset, and the panel also provides extra protection for the screen.

At the heart of the XSL8-9550, as you might have guessed from the numbering, is one of Intel’s 45nm Q9550 desktop Core 2 Quad processors.

Clocked at 2.83GHz, the Q9950 has a front-side bus (FSB) speed of 1,333MHz with all four cores sharing 12MB of L2 cache.

Supporting the CPU is an Intel P965/ICH8R chipset combination while the pre-installed Windows Vista Home Premium operating system is kept happy by 4GB of PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 memory. If you need more, the motherboard supports a maximum of 8GB.

All this power certainly gives the XSL8 plenty of oomph and it lives up to Rock’s claim of being the ‘world’s fastest laptop’. It certainly is the fastest we have ever tested, with a PCmark score of 8,680 and managing a reasonable score of 5,209 in the more demanding PCmark Vantage.

Its graphics performance is, as you might expect, equally impressive. As mentioned above, it uses two Nvidia graphics cards configured in an SLI setup; one Geforce Go 9800M GTX with 1GB of GDDR3 memory would be interesting enough, but two produces some startling scores: 14,099 in 3Dmark06 at a 1,024x768 resolution, but only dropping to 12,140 at the screen’s native 1,920x1,200 resolution.

When it comes to real gaming, using World in Conflict’s built-in benchmark at 1,920x1,200 it produces an average frame rate score of 17fps – hardly playable, but that was with all the game options set to their highest settings. Reducing either or both settings and resolution should give some much higher frame rates, as proved by the 43fps average result from running the benchmark at 1,024x768 but still with the high detail settings.

The 17in WUXGA TFT screen is excellent, with a 1,920x1,200 pixel native resolution and X-Glass coating, making it ideal for playing games or watching movies using the built-in Blu-ray drive. There is a webcam built into the top edge of the screen’s bezel, too.

The three hard drives can be ordered built into 750GB, 960GB or 1.5TB Raid arrays, though in our review sample they were kept as three separate drives, in this case Samsung 250GB, 7,200rpm units.

As you might expect for a desktop replacement notebook, there are plenty of ports and communication options, with most of the ports housed in the left-hand side of the chassis alongside and above the optical drive.

Lan (for the Gigabit Ethernet), VGA out, four-pin Firewire, and modem ports are joined by an Express card slot and a 7-in-1 card reader. Two double stacks of USB2 ports are built into the right-hand side of the chassis, while the rear panel holds a DVI port and an S-video port. As well as the wired Ethernet you get 802.11a/b/g/n Wifi and Bluetooth 2.0EDR.

A notebook such as this is destined to spend its life plugged into a wall socket but we tested the battery anyway and it confirmed what we thought: just over an hour using it in normal everyday use and just under an hour for watching a DVD.