Labs

Eclipse's Titan is one of two 17in widescreen laptops here, but its display is disappointing. Despite its glossy finish, colours looked dark and gloomy. White areas had a grey cast, the backlight was uneven and images looked grainy. It's the worst laptop display here.

The Titan's keyboard has a numeric keypad for fast number entry in spreadsheets. It has a non-standard layout, with the Enter and full-stop keys in the wrong place. This is a shame, considering the large areas

ADVERTISEMENT

of unused plastic to either side of the keyboard. The keys don't feel as spongy as those on the MSI laptop, but they're uncomfortable to use after long periods. The touch pad buttons are a little small, but the pad itself is accurate.

The Titan is one of three laptops here with an HDMI port. It also has four USB2 ports and an optical S/PDIF output, but there's no FireWire port for connecting older DV cameras.

Performance

The Titan's Core 2 Duo T7500 processor is the fastest here, and it's one of three laptops here with 2GB of RAM. It was easily the fastest laptop in our Windows performance tests, with a score of 176. The Titan's Nvidia GeForce 8600M GS graphics gave it the second-highest Call of Duty 2 score in the group, at just less than 14fps, but you'll still need to reduce the display resolution and graphical settings to get smooth frame rates in the latest games.

Although the Titan had the second-shortest battery life in our group, it lasted over three-and-a-half hours, which is enough for a fairly long train journey.