Quaddra DTS - PC Home (Nov '03)

Can Rock’s widescreen stand-up to the competition or is it a lumbering turkey?

A few months back we rated AJPs D480W widescreen model, since then a couple of other widescreen laptops have appeared, all using the same generic casing with similar specifications.

Rock’s Quaddra DTS is the latest of them and offers a better value package with some attractive options. Like the AJP version, the Quaddra DTS is very heavy, therefore not too portable.

The specification is powerful enough to be considered a desktop replacement, and with a mouse and keyboard attached you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Our review model is the lowest specified and came equipped with a 2.8GHz mobile Pentium 4, 60Gb HDD and 512Mb of RAM. The graphics card is an ATi Mobility 9000 chipset, which gives a far better performance than the average found in many portable systems. For those who’d prefer something more powerful there are 3GHz CPUs available and a shiny new Ati 9600 graphics, but these don’t come cheap.

More interesting though is the DVD writer that Rock offer as an upgrade, which for £176, replaces the CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive with a DVD-/+RW. This is a small amount for such a useful addition and anyone looking at the Quaddra should seriously think about it, especially as the 17” monitor is ideal for DVD movies.

The three USB2 ports and lone firewire connection serve external hardware and there is also the welcome addition of a floppy disk drive. The sound card is a 5.1 Dolby Digital Theatre System (hence the ‘DTS’ tag) that is augmented with the modular subwoofer unit, giving some of the best sound output we’ve heard from a notebook system.

Rock has put together an impressive package and while it may not be cheap it’s still good value, an attractive portable system that has the raw power to challenge many desktop machines.

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