SIGMA 466

Best Buy Award
PC Home (July '00)

The First noticeable difference between the Rock Sigma and most other sub £1,500 notebooks is that the screen is larger. Believe me, you'll notice the difference between a 13.3in screen and the 14.1in screen on the Sigma. The processor installed in the Sigma. The processor installed on the Sigma comes in the form of an Intel Celeron 466MHz and is the slowest in this round-up, albeit by a small margin. 64Mb of RAM is pre-installed and can be expanded to a respectable 256Mb should you come across some spare cash. There are two PCMCIA card slots on the Sigma and, thanks to the internal modem, both of these are free.

The Sigma has gone with the attractive metallic silver look and the power button is located just above the keyboard. so when the lid is closed you can't accidentally turn the machine on., easily done with models that have their power button on the outside.

8Mb of Video RAM. The ATI Rage Pro graphics card has 8Mb of video RAM installed on it, which is a bonus since most notebooks only come with 4Mb. With a fairly decent set of speakers, as far as notebooks are concerned, and the large screen, the Sigma acts as a very capable portable DVD player, although the quality of the picture isn't that amazing.

Notebooks can sometimes be a little temperamental and aren't quite as easy as desktop PC's to fix, Rock offers a good one year collect and return warranty system and if they can't fix it within five days a loan unit will be supplied.

The Sigma from Rock may not be the fastest, but it has a decent sized monitor and manages to stay £150 below the price limit for this round up; all in all, a good budget buy.

PC Home Best Buy

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