Product Reviews

The Multivision Solus has a pretty special claim to fame: it uses a 9600 Mobility Radeon graphics chip. This is ATI's fastest graphics chip for notebooks, boldly delivering 3D gaming power where none has gone before. The thing is, cool technology is all very well - but it's not enough to make a great system. For that, you need the whole package: speed, features and a PC that's comfortable to use. To find out if it fits the bill, I put the Solus through its paces.

The Solus has a great set of features. With its 60GB hard disk, you won't run out of storage space any time soon - and 512MB of memory is plenty, even for the most demanding software. But aside from its graphics, the thing that makes this system really stand out is its Panasonic DVD writer. This lets you write your own DVDs, so you can back up gigabytes of data or, if you're adventurous, record your own home movies. And with the kind of power this laptop provides, you should have no problem using it to edit video. The Multivision even has a mini-FireWire port, so you can plug your digital video camera into this system. If you want to write video from an analogue camcorder to a DVD, though, you'll have to use some sort of external video capture device to import it.

If watching movies is more your thing, you can use this notebook to watch DVDs on a TV using its S-video out connector. Two USB 2 ports allow you to hook up external devices, and there's parallel port if you need to plug in an old printer. Multivision has even thrown in an 801.11b wireless network card.

The Solus's keyboard is gratifyingly good. The keys strike home firmly as you type. Its layout is fairly standard, so you won't end up hitting the wrong keys because nothing is where you expect it to be. I would have preferred

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the space bar to be a bit bigger, but that's a minor complaint. The touchpad is sensitive, but not overly so. This is handy, because you don't want the cursor to shoot across the screen every time you brush past the pad accidentally. The screen itself is 15 inches diagonally across, which is impressive for a notebook, and just what you need for playing games on the move.

This is the fastest notebook we've ever seen at Computer Buyer. The combination of a Radeon 9600 graphics chip with 512MB of RAM and a 2.5GHz Pentium 4-M processor adds up to incredible gaming performance, as the 3DMark score of 9,169 demonstrates. Even with fancy image-enhancing features such as anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing turned on, this system scored almost 6,000 points in 3DMark 2001. This is particularly impressive, as such features can slow fast desktop machines to an unplayable crawl.

The Solus is pretty well built, too. It has no fancy feature buttons, but that's not a bad thing. Feature buttons are often unnecessary, and this laptop's clean, smart lines provide a dash of minimalist style. The notebook's lid is slightly flimsy, but unless you plan on knocking this system about, that shouldn't be a problem.

At this point you're probably wondering what the catch is. Why does a laptop with this much going for it get such a low score? Unfortunately, when the Solus had been running for a little while, it got very hot, and started to behave very strangely. The processor slowed itself down to 1.4GHz - exactly what you'd expect of a Pentium 4-M that was overheating. The system then froze, and the screen went blank apart from a single blinking cursor. After being left to cool down for a few minutes, it rebooted into Safe Mode - the stripped-down state that Windows launches after a hiccup. But within minutes the system was uncomfortably hot again. This time, the cursor started jumping erratically around the screen every time we used the touchpad.

The Solus has some great features, and it's the fastest notebook we've ever laid eyes on. We'd really like to be able to recommend this system. But until its overheating problems are fixed, we can't. If Multivision manages to sort out the Solus's cooling, we'd be happy to re-assess what should have been a tip-top bargain. In its current state, though, we'll have to pass.

Karl Wright