Labs

Features

The Zeus's chassis looks as smart and feels as sturdy as those of the other laptops, but it's by far the noisiest laptop in the group when given a heavy workload. Its keyboard feels spongy, but the layout is sensible and the touch pad is accurate. Like all the laptops here except HP's 6720s, the Zeus's screen has a glossy finish. This flatters photos and video, but poor vertical viewing angles and strong reflections make it less than ideal for creative graphics work.

A webcam is integrated into the lid above the screen, and although it's

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not as high quality as the one in Acer's Aspire, it's fine for video calls. The Zeus is the only laptop in the group to come with a Windows installation DVD, so you don't lose any disk space to a hidden restore partition.

Performance

The Zeus is one of three laptops in the group with a relatively slow 1.5GHz processor and has just 1GB of RAM. It came last in all our Windows benchmarks except the video-encoding test, where it narrowly beat Acer's Aspire. The laptop's Nvidia GeForce 8400M G graphics are unique here in having 128MB of dedicated graphics memory. It gained the best result in Call of Duty 2, but 7.7fps is still unplayable, as was the 17.2fps result it achieved at minimal graphics settings. This laptop will handle games from a couple of years ago, but it's not a gaming machine. Its battery life is the second-worst in the group, managing only an hour and a half of light use.

Verdict

Eclipse's Zeus i525n84 has a poor keyboard, a noisy cooling fan, below-average performance in Windows applications and short battery life. If you want to play older games, we'd recommend Samsung's superior R60.