KribiBench, Realstorm, XviD, HDTach
KribiBench shows aptitude for Intel's CPU. That's good news for Rock, as it soundly thrashes both the desktop and laptop Athlon 64 3200+ PCs.
Realstorm's Raytacing takes the opposite view. What's more important is that the XTR-3.2's result is in keeping with other Intel-based systems'.
But the tables turn again when looking at the results from our media encoding test. A clear 90-second lead over the Voodoo PC Envy m:855 is impressive performance. It helps in not thinking of the Xtreme XTR-3.2 as a laptop. It carries startlingly similar components and ASICs as a full-size machine, so performance has to be good. A 3.2GHz Pentium 4, Intel i865PE Springdale motherboard, 512MB DDR400 memory, Radeon 9600 Pro graphics adapter, 80GB hard drive, Gigabit Ethernet, 54g Wireless, Bluetooth, 15" TFT, and multiformat DVD-ReWriter makes for a fine desktop PC, doesn't it?.
One of the compromises, however, has been made in the hard drive department. 80GB is formidable capacity for a laptop hard drive. What graphs can't convey is the slugishness of a 4,200RPM drive for day-to-day tasks. Rock's XTR-3.2 feels significantly slower than Voodoo's m:855 in general Windows' use. The latter uses an excellent 60GB 7,200RPM hard drive. We'd easily swap take the 60GB version. It looks like a case of Rock putting apparent specification ahead of real-world performance.
