Product Reviews

After a slow start, we are beginning to see more notebooks that use the new MXM upgradable notebook graphics standard. So far, both the notebooks we've seen with MXM graphics have used nVidia modules, but Rock's Pegasus 650 has ATI's Radeon X700 chipset.

Rock describes the Pegasus 650 as a gaming notebook, and its styling is certainly more leisure than business. The lid on our test unit has a varnished metallic finish that looks great, and it's available in four other finishes. The chassis feels sturdy with little flex in the base, and at 3.2kg the notebook is fairly easy to transport.

The Pegasus 650 has a large footprint, but this means there's plenty of room for your wrists when typing, and the keyboard has excellent travel and feedback. The recessed touch pad looks great and is very accurate, with huge buttons. The screen could be brighter, but otherwise

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it's hard to fault. Contrast is astounding for a non-reflective display, and the vibrant colours do not fade at the edges of the screen and have no hint of graininess.

The base of the notebook houses three USB2.0 ports and FireWire, and a small switch on the front of the chassis swaps between ATI's discrete graphics chipset and the integrated graphics on the motherboard to prolong the battery life when you're not playing games. The battery lasted for 125 minutes when using the ATI chipset, but this improved to 210 minutes when we reverted to the motherboard's built-in graphics.

Our test notebook was the top-of-the-range model with a 2.13GHz Intel Pentium M processor and 1GB of RAM. It's very powerful, and its scores in the Shopper benchmarks and PCMark04 are the best we have seen from a notebook with a mobile processor. Its gaming performance was also impressive - 23.1fps in our Doom 3 benchmark shows that it's capable of running today's games at high resolutions and detail levels, but it is not as fast as MV's Ixius 15, which we reviewed in What's New, Shopper October 2005.

Rock's Pegasus 650 is a very stylish and desirable notebook with an excellent screen and impressive 2D and 3D performance. Being able to turn off the discrete graphics chipset to boost the battery life is a novel idea, but the notebook is rather expensive. If you're after a bargain gaming notebook, MV's Ixius 15 is better value, but it's not as stylish as the Pegasus.