Product Reviews

AJP won a Best Buy award in our gaming notebooks lab test in Shopper June 2005 with its D900T. 3D graphics technology moves quickly, however, and nVidia's GeForce Go 7800GTX has prompted the release of this updated model.

The D900T-X's chassis is massive and weighs 5.5kg so you won't want to carry it far. It's just about light enough to move round the house or take to a friend's house for network gaming. The large chassis also allows space for a full keyboard with keypad. The keyboard is good, with lots of travel and positive feedback. The touch pad is average, but most gamers will use a USB mouse.

Every port we can think of has been provided: there are four USB2 and two FireWire ports, four minijack audio outputs and a range of legacy ports. It also has a 6-in-1 card reader for digital camera users. Finally, S-video and DVI ports are provided, so you can connect the notebook to external displays.

The

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notebook's own display is a big 17" widescreen. With a native resolution of 1,680x1,050 it provides all the desktop space you'll need. It isn't the brightest screen, so colours lack a little vibrancy, but both the greyscale and colour wheel tests showed very smooth transitions.

The front has built-in audio controls, so you can play CDs without having to boot into Windows. The D900T-X's speakers are better than those on most notebooks, although they're still not good enough for gaming, so we'd advise you to invest in a decent pair of headphones.

In applications its performance is very impressive. With an overall Shopper benchmark score of 130, this is the fastest notebook we've ever seen. It's not surprising given the 3.8GHz Pentium 4 670 processor and 3GB of RAM. All this power comes at the expense of battery life, though, which lasted a meagre 70 minutes in our tests.

The AJP's gaming performance also sets a new standard for notebooks. Its 3DMark03 score of 14,510 is only just short of that achieved by similarly equipped desktop computers. Its Doom 3 score of 80.9fps is again in line with desktops. This notebook will let you play games at the highest detail settings for some time to come.

The D900T-X is a great desktop replacement and has tons of 3D power for games. However, in our opinion, this model is over-specified. The 3GB of RAM is unnecessary and AJP could have saved money by using a slower processor. If speed is your only concern, though, the D900T-X is for you.