UK's most powerful lappy tested

HEXUS CHECKS the Rockdirect Xtreme 64 4800+ laptop which is probably one of the fastest Desktop replacement Laptops available on the continent. It comes with a dual core AMD Athlon 64 4800+, two 100GB 7200rpm HDD and a price north of £2500. With a 17-inch widescreen, 256MB Geforce Go 7800GTX mobile graphics card, this 5.7Kg mammoth will probably make some players out ther egreen with envy, if you can afford it.

Firingsquad is again at it with the Intel Penitum Extreme Edition 955 CPU with its 65nm manufacturing process. The new Presler core comes with 4MB cache, amounts that we usually found on servers rather than desktop PCs. Presler also comes with Intel's Virtualisation Technology and while it might be expensive, there are loads of gamers who will buy into Intel's marchitecture. For now, check out the forthcoming 65nm low cost Pentium D.

Xbitlabs has a look at the S3 Chrome S27 graphic processor which was covered over here some times ago. It is set to compete where the competition is the fiercest - mainstream graphic cards like the X700/X1300Pro, 6600 series. With a core frequency of 700MHz, it can be considered to be an GPU equivalent for the Netburst Architecture, high clock speed, relatively low efficiency. But as the review demonstrates, the card itself is a worthy candidate in terms of performance but certainly not in terms of compatibility and pricing.

Designtechnica reviews the Denon S-301 which is a high end sound system aimed at people looking for a clean neat compact solution to couple with their telly set. The S-301 comes with Dolby's Virtual Speaker Technology which produces centre and surround sounds even if they are not there. Comes with a price that matches its placement. But to its credit, the S-301 comes with a FM/AM tuner, a DVD player, Apple iPod support and HDMI input.

A very interesting and practical article on building a NAS out of a modified Xbox; produced by Tomsnetworking. It is divided in two parts which can be found here and here. The author also shows you how to install Samba, SWAT, Bit Torrent, Torrent Flux as well as adding stuff like a second hard drive, USB ports and mod chip. The Xbox is dirty cheap, still it might be a good idea to buy a second hand dual processor computer and convert it into a dedicated fileserver.

Anandtech has a technical preview of the Sun UltraSparc T1 codenamed Niagara which focuses on Thread Level Parallelism and delivers some extreme performance. It is pretty much power efficient and performs remarkably under certain condition. Anandtech's article proves also to be a good introduction to what server processors need to be able to perform. With eight cores, 3MB cache, it might seem to be an unbeatable product. Except that there are some smokes and mirrors.