Product Reviews

If you could specify the most powerful notebook currently available, it would probably be something along the lines of this monster from AJP. It has a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 processor, 2GB of DDR2 533MHz memory and a PCI Express motherboard.

The D900T's huge, heavy chassis really puts the desk in desktop replacement. It has room for a full complement of ports; at the rear are parallel, serial, PS/2, modem and Gigabit Ethernet connectors. The left panel houses four USB2 ports, two FireWire and four 3.5mm audio jack sockets for the onboard Intel 7.1 channel audio. A webcam is built into the screen's top bezel.

The graphics processor in our review model was an nVidia GeForce Go 6800 with 256MB of dedicated memory, although the computer is also available with an ATI Mobility Radeon X800.

Either adaptor supplies a 1,440x900 resolution picture to a 17" widescreen panel. This has quite good viewing angles and smooth greyscale shading, but

We were expecting very good performance, and we weren't disappointed. The D900T narrowly outperformed the Dell Inspiron 9100 we reviewed in What's New, Shopper November 2004; previously the most powerful notebook we had seen.

The AJP's 3D performance was strong, with the notebook recording 36.4 frames per second in Doom 3. This is a fantastic result for a portable computer, and means the D900T is capable of running cutting-edge games at high resolution and quality settings.

Gamers will also appreciate the notebook's full-size number pad, but the area surrounding the keyboard gets warm. It sits high above desk level and at the back of a deep base, so soon becomes uncomfortable. Despite a Gigabit Ethernet adaptor and wireless networking, the D900T's staid looks rob it of any great LAN-party kudos.

Sound from the five onboard speakers is loud and good for a notebook. There is surprisingly little noise from cooling fans, but our sample emitted an intermittent high-pitched sound.

The D900T is for people who want the best possible performance but not a full-sized PC. But with a similarly specified desktop PC costing around £600 less, the AJP needs to feel more special.