Hi-Grade Ultinote D6000-2002

Intel's new Core 2 Duo for notebooks has hit the ground running. Even before the day of its official release, Hi-Grade had submitted the D6000-2002 to us for review, and considering the cutting-edge technology inside we were pleasantly surprised by its price. At £1,099 (£1,291 inc VAT), it's even cheaper than the Evesham (see p61), which includes a lesser processor, and almost £300 less than the Rock Xtreme CTX Pro (see p60).

It should be no surprise that the Ultinote uses a slower processor than the Rock: the 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 rather than the 2.33GHz T7600. But slow isn't really a word that should be associated with the T7200: thanks in part to 4MB of cache, it absolutely raced through our strenuous application-based tests. Its overall score of 1.22 would have been impressive from a high-end desktop a few months ago, let alone a mid-range notebook, and translates into speed 22% above our reference PC based on a 3.2GHz Pentium D processor.

The 15.4in screen isn't quite the showstopping partner this performance deserves, though, with a resolution of just 1,280 x 800 pixels. If you tend to work in a single application at a time, you might cope with the small Desktop, but we soon found ourselves wanting more pixels. Our colour-handling tests showed it to be of good technical quality, though. Photos showed no colour-reproduction errors, backed up by smooth colour ramps with little sign of banding.

However, we did see some noticeable lag when gaming and watching videos. Most frustrating of all is the narrow vertical viewing angle: even when sat directly facing the screen, colours distort across the top and bottom. We aren't fans of the ultra-shiny gloss coating either, which renders the screen unviewable in brightly lit situations. It also lacks brightness, although it does dim down to a low level for when battery life is paramount.

Unfortunately, we found ourselves resorting to this too often, as the battery's performance was poor. Under light use, it lasted less than two hours, and even dimming the screen entirely and using all the power-saving tricks in the book couldn't push it over this mark.

Any ambitions of modern 3D gaming will be as short-lived as the battery, as the ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics barely handled our test games at a resolution of 1,024 x 768, let alone the native 1,280 x 800. Last year's games at low settings are more its level.

This 3.6kg notebook isn't the most beautiful of creations either. Its biggest offence is the dark blue keyboard, which is at odds with the black and silver plastic surrounding it. This plastic is variously ridged, indented, rounded or smooth, with the metal mesh on either side of the keyboard enforcing the feeling of design chaos every time we opened the lid. Sleek and smart it isn't. On the plus side, the curiously designed chassis is at least solidly built, giving a good level of protection to both motherboard and screen.

The Ultinote has other redeeming features too. The keyboard is a real pleasure to work on, with a pleasing firmness under the finger, and just the right amount of travel and resistance. Layout is near perfect too, with all the odd non-QWERTY keys in logically grouped positions to the right.

We're also pleased to see a capacious 100GB hard disk, and a dual-layer, dual-format DVD writer, plus a 3-in-1 media card reader. As a Centrino Duo notebook, you get 802.11a/b/g to complement the Gigabit Ethernet, and there are four USB 2 ports plus mini-FireWire and a D-SUB output. Home users will also appreciate the integrated digital/analogue TV tuner with Windows XP Media Center Edition, and the two-year international collect-and-return warranty is reassuring too.