SIGMA SI

PC Basics (July '01)

Silver on the outside and black on the inside, the Sigma Si from rockdirect.com manages to stay up there with the best in terms of looks. Rock has submitted a number of quality, high spec notebooks over the past months, so it was no surprise to see that this effort included a 1GHz Pentium III processor from Intel. What we really didn’t expect, however was to find an ample 256Mb of RAM begging to be used by any array of applications.

Keeping up with the high-spec theme, the screen measures in at an impressive 14.1”, whilst the 20Gb hard drive should be able to cope with storing more than a few programs. The graphics card shares the whopping 256Mb of RAM and can be allocated either 8Mb, 16Mb or a maximum of 32Mb of RAM, which will allow the 1GHz processor to run some pretty graphics-intensive programs.

FIREWIRE READY

Skimming around the outside of the Sigma Si revealed the usual two USB ports, modem socket and other connection possibilities. However, something that is rarely found on desktop PC’s was located, namely an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port. It’s uses are at the moment a little limited since there aren’t many PC devices that use this ultra-fast technology, but fairly soon you’ll see it really taking off in terms of Digital Video and other high-bandwidth tasks, so don’t think it isn’t useful! Another small surprise is that unlike the other manufacturers in this roundup, Rock has decided to stick with Windows 98 rather than the newer Me version; the debate still rages on as to whether Me offers better or worse performance.

The Sigma Si manages to be the almost expensive notebook on offer here, so is the £1,644 asking price reasonable? We’ll we have to give it the thumbs-up. When you consider that you’re getting a super-fast 1GHz processor, a whopping 256Mb of RAM, all sat in an overall good quality notebook with a 14.1” screen, it’s a real ‘value for money’ high-power notebook.

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