External thoughts
Bear in mind that what you're looking at is a 19-inch wide-aspect LCD display housed in a laptop's chassis. An ultra-large chassis, measuring close to 50cm in width and almost 35cm in depth, makes it possibly the largest laptop currently available. rockdirect shipped the Xtreme SL's LCD with a native resolution of 1680x1050. This WSXGA setting gives a pixel pitch that, on balance, is just about right for a screen of this size. Some may argue, with validity, that a WUXGA (1920x1200) would be better-suited here, especially as a number of 15.4-inch and 17-inch panels specify it.
Text is sharp, colours are well-defined, and contrast/brightness are even across the entire screen. Like most laptops that emanate from rockdirect's DTR range, the Xtreme SL's screen has a reflective coating that's slightly compromised with natural light bouncing off it. A 1.3MP webcam is integrated into the chassis, as well.
The nature of the chassis dictates that there's lots of room around the touchpad, and there's enough space to house a full-size keyboard, replete with number-pad. One minor quibble, though, is the small 'enter' key. There's plenty of room to house a double-height key that's found on most discrete keyboards.
2 meaty speakers provide decent sound. augmented by a couple of smaller speakers and what rockdirect optimistically refers to as a built-in subwoofer. A total of 5 keys are situated to the left of the power button. A couple control the default browser and email clients, and a further couple enable or disable the laptop's Bluetooth and webcam functions (WiFi can also be manually).
What's more interesting, however, is the blue 3D key on the very left-hand side. Pressing it illuminates the key and, according to the manual, puts the video card(s) in high-performance mode. That's bit of a misnomer, really, as illuminated high-perf. mode, only available when the laptop is plugged into mains supply, simply runs the card(s) at their nominal 400MHz/1000MHz frequencies. Low-power mode reduces performance to a comparative crawl and is best-used in battery-operated mode.
We've been making constant references to the chassis size. Here is the Xtreme SL with a Dell 630M laptop on top. The Dell is a medium-sized notebook, weighing in at 2.5kg and sporting a 14.1-inch wide-aspect display. The rockdirect machine makes it look like a sub-notebook in comparison. Mobility sacrificed for sheer speed.
