Hi-Grade Ultinote M6600

I n a similar way to the VHS vs Betamax war of the 1980s, DVD burners have yet to settle on a standard, but that hasn't stopped Hi-Grade from installing the latest mobile DVD-RW drives in its notebooks. Almost everything from the £999 Notino 4400-1800 (see p56) to this top-notch £1,599 Ultinote M6600 has been given the DVD-RW medicine, and why not? You may not be able to play movies on every set-top box, but it will make a useful high-capacity backup solution and, you never know, it might even make compatible movie discs too.

That's not all that's special about the M6600, though. It's also one of the fastest notebooks we've seen. Using Intel's latest 2.4GHz Pentium 4-M mobile processor and 512MB of RAM, it knocked out a very respectable 2D benchmark score of 1.19. Not only that, but it comes kitted out with Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go graphics for 3D graphics too.

As with desktop 3D graphics, ATi is currently in front of Nvidia's notebook chips with its Radeon Mobility 9000, but the GeForce4 420 Go is still a decent chip. With 32MB of dedicated memory, it can happily run at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour with 32-bit textures, and at these settings it can still produce a good 3DMark2001 SE score of 4,114. There's no DirectX 8 hardware, but there's certainly enough power to play most of today's games, although they may struggle at the panel's native resolution.

You certainly get a lot on the screen in SXGA+ resolution, but it can start to look small and fiddly on the 15in screen. That said, the M6600's picture is clear and sharp, although it could do with being a bit brighter and the vertical viewing angles are slightly suspect.

The keyboard is also comfortably large, although it has a tendency to bounce when typing heavily. The large chassis isn't ideal for ergonomic typing either, as the huge palmrests can dig into your wrist.

The other obvious disadvantage of a large chassis is portability. Its huge dimensions of 336 x 284 x 40mm (W x D x H) are unwieldy to say the least, and at 3.2kg you'll only want to lug the M6600 around if you have to. It's also not the most stylish notebook in town, and the plastic finish isn't that solid either.

Ergonomics and styling aside, the other problem with the M6600 is the heat-sensitive cooling system. This springs into action whenever things get too hot and makes a annoying warbling noise.

But the large chassis also has an advantage up its sleeve, which is that it can squeeze in lots of features, and Hi-Grade has gone to town on this. There's a row of four USB 2 ports on the back with a four-pin FireWire port, which will be great for adding the inevitable array of external peripherals. There's also a single Type II PC Card slot and, for digital camera users, a multimedia slot on the side, which accepts SmartMedia, Memory Stick, SDC and MMC media.

The real bonus, however, has to be the DVD-RW combo drive. As well as providing a 16x/10x/24x CD-RW, it offers a 1x/1x/8x DVD-RW as a 4.7GB backup solution.

So the M6600's fully featured and more than fast enough. In fact, the only notebooks we've seen that beat this level of 2D performance are based on desktop processors. The 2.8GHz Red Submarine DV-LT 2.8 (see Reviews, issue 100, p118), for example, scored 1.42 in our benchmarks but sacrificed battery life in the process.

While the Red Submarine only lasted for 54 minutes in our intensive battery test, the Hi-Grade went on for 97 minutes and even lasted for 156 minutes under light use. This should be enough for most people and is on a par with most desktop replacements. The A-Listed Dell Inspiron 8200 2.2GHz P4-M (see Reviews, issue 97, p124), for example, lasted 150 minutes in our light-use test with one battery.