Intruduction
Rock Xtreme Ti performance updateWe took a look at Rockdirect's Xtreme Ti 3.6 laptop a short while back. Jampacked with components that would read well if viewed from a pure desktop perspective, we were generally impressed by its sheer do-it-all power. It carried ATI's Mobility RADEON X800 256MB graphics card which, although pretty damn quick for a laptop GPU, wasn't as fast as NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go Ultra contained in Dell's XPS Gen 2 laptop, which made excellent use of GDDR3 DRAM.
Rockdirect was eager for us to appreciate that its latest Xtreme Ti laptop upped the performance ante once more. Now outfitted with a Pentium 4 570 processor ticking along at 3.8GHz, it also harnessed the qualities of ATI's Mobility RADEON X800 XT. Adding suffixs to existing SKUs usually translates to a minor speed bump. This time, though, the XT variant is a lot, lot faster than the incumbent card. Armed with a new CPU and much faster graphics card, we set about evaluating Rockdirect's new top-of-the-line baby against Dell XPS Gen 2. What we really wanted to investigate, then, is whether the XTI 3.8 could dethrone Dell's mobile wonder as the fastest laptop around.
