AJP 5600D

AJP's very expensive 5600D is incredibly well featured. It has a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 desktop chip, currently the fastest chip you can fit into a notebook, regardless of size, without it overheating.

This chip is the main reason for the size of the 5600D - it's one of the biggest notebooks to cross our paths. This is needed to fit extra fans and heatsinks to ensure that it doesn't fry.

Impressively, even after three days being solidly on and plugged into the mains, it genuinely felt cool; you could barely tell it had been on. As good as this is, though, you wouldn't want to have this on your lap for too long: above 3kg is too much for most laps.

Sysmark was excellent at 228, helped out by 512MB of DDR memory. 3Dmark 2001 performance came out at 6,951, one of the best notebook graphics scores ever, due to the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics chip inside.

The screen is disappointing in comparison, coming out slightly blurry. It's by no means unusable, but we would have hoped for more, given the quality of the rest of the notebook.

The keyboard is large and excellently laid out, and the mouse buttons small but otherwise good to use. The LCD and playback control functions are very useful, as you can play CDs without even opening the notebook.

We were pleased to find a floppy drive, as it's becoming quite a rarity, and a DVD/CD-RW drive is always welcome. Four USB2s, a mini-firewire, modem, Ethernet, serial and parallel, PS/2, S-Video and, most impressively, optical audio out are around the back.

Battery life is very poor at just over an hour, but, again, you wouldn't want to carry this around for long.

DETAILS
Price: £1,733.13 (£1,475 ex VAT)
Contact: AJP 020 8208 9777
www.ajp.co.uk