Outward Appearance
Let's start outside.
I've turned on the chassis' CD player functionality for this photograph of the front. With the lid shut and the laptop completely powered off, if there's charge in the battery you can fire up the CD player, pop in a disc and have feed out to the headphone socket round the left side of the chassis, or blare out from the five speakers. And those five speakers, for a laptop, are incredible. The subwoofer partners two pairs of stereo speakers, one on the front on either side of the display, and the second pairing flanking the keyboard under the lid. Bass response isn't great but there's definite punch there and the mid-range and trebles are reasonably clear and crisp. There's not much warmth in the sound but it'll certainly do for a game or a DVD action movie. What there is, too, is fearsome volume. At the maximum of 20, you'd not fail to anger an entire carriage full of train passengers.
The left side, shown above, is where you'll find most of the ports. Starting near the hinge at the left, there's an S-video connector for TV-out, four USB2.0 sockets, two four-pin FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) ports (like all four-port FireWire sockets, they can't provide power to external drives) and speaker, mic and headphone points. Finishing up, there's a single 32-bit CardBus slot with an IrDA port to its right and the four sockets of the integrated seven-way card reader below.
Moving round the back and peeking through the gaps in the vents, you can partially see the mass of copper that serves to cool the processor. This heatsink assembly incorporates no less than five-heatpipes, and runs nearly the entire length of the chassis at the rear. I'll show you a bit more of those, later. Then you've got the AC adaptor's power input, plus a serial port, a parallel port, a DVI output, a PS/2 connector, ports for the 56K internal modem and onboard Gigabit Ethernet and a rubber cover that hides the S-video and the antennae inputs (which are only functional if you've specified the optional TV-tuner). DVI on portable PCs is a rarity, but given the workstation-class graphics, somehow it'd be ridiculous for the Katana 3D-9 not to feature it.
The right side is sparsely populated. There are stacked-and-staggered bays for a pair of optical drives, with the top populated by a dual-layer DVD burner, plus a Kensington lock hole for tethering the Katana 3D-9 to something big and heavy. Perhaps to another 3D-9? No, don't be silly.
On the bottom of the PC is a multitude of covers that hide the expandable and changeable bits of the chassis. There are also five circular, mesh-covered apertures; four of which are fan-assisted air intakes, and the fifth is for the sub-woofer. Again, there'll be more on those later.
Summary
Aesthetically, the Katana 3D-9 is quite pleasing but it's not in the same league as the SavRoyal Katana D-90 variant that the company offers in all-over customised paint finishes. The 3D-9's brushed aluminium lid is topped by a SavRow badge and Katana emblem and carries a protective adhesive sheet.However, with the sheet removed, it became clear that the unprotected lid picks up fingerprints all too easily and was very prone to scratching - indeed, I accidentally scratched it on the zipper teeth of the supplied carry case. At first I felt guilty but soon realised that this was a problem that every purchaser could well suffer; unless that is, they shelled out extra for one of the deluxe triple lacquered paint jobs SavRow seem to offer on every machine (which I suspect that many are going to do).
The lid-release catches are easy to operate, and the lid requires some effort to raise or lower. That's as it should be and prevents the lid slamming down on its own.
Let's take a closer look.
