Rock Xtreme 685 review

Rock laptops have always been aimed squarely at the high-end; their no-compromise approach to performance in a portable package can give desktop PCs a run for their money, and the Xtreme 685 is no exception. A Full HD screen, Blu-ray reader and fast graphics card make this a formidable machine, but this list of components alone isn’t enough to justify its high price.

In order to squeeze such high-performance hardware a laptop, the Xtreme 685 is much thicker than average. It’s not exactly easy on the eye, or on your shoulder. At 3.1kg you won’t want to be lugging it far, especially with its oversized power supply. However, it’s easy to forget all this once you start using it thanks to the gorgeous high resolution screen. At 1,920×1,080, text can be incredibly small, but this is less of a problem once you’ve increased its default size in Windows. Colours were mostly accurate, but only when we sat directly in front of the screen: viewing angles were very poor, with a shift in colour and contrast even at shallow angles. There’s a reasonable amount of screen tilt to compensate for vertical viewing angles, but the glossy finish picked up lots of light reflections.

Sound quality is decent (and loud) enough to be able to listen to music from across the room. At maximum volume, there was a noticeable amount of bass from the ‘subwoofer’ built into the underside of the laptop, although the speakers above the keyboard tray produced mid-range notes that were slightly muddy.

Using the Xtreme for some everyday tasks like word processing, we immediately noticed how noisy the keyboard was. In spite of this, each flat, isolated key was a good size and had plenty of tactile feedback. A dedicated number pad has been squeezed in without having to reduce the size of the keys, which makes data entry much easier. The expansive touchpad is made of the same rubberised plastic as the rest of the upper chassis, which is slightly resistive to finger movement, but still responsive. A fingerprint reader has been dropped in between the two touchpad buttons, which are a decent size and have crisp actions.

Performance can make or break any laptop, and unfortunately it’s here where the Xtreme falters. Rock has used a mid-range Intel Core i5 processor, rather than the more powerful Core i7 chips other manufacturers install in similarly priced machines. The dual-core i5-2540m runs at 2.6GHz, rising to 3.3GHz with Turbo Boost, and is paired with 4GB of RAM. It managed a respectably 64 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which should be enough for most tasks, but heavily multi-threaded programs might struggle with only two physical processor cores.

By using a slightly cheaper processor, Rock has focused on gaming performance by installing a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 460M GTX graphics card. It might not be a new model, but is still powerful. It flew through our Dirt 3 benchmark at an impressive 67fps. Even once we’d raised the resolution to 1,920×1,080 and enabled the High detail setting, it still managed a playable 48fps. Unfortunately, without Optimus to switch to integrated graphics, battery life suffered: the Xtreme barely managed two and a half hours away from the mains in our light-use test.

The Xtreme 685 makes sense as a replacement for a desktop PC; connectivity is almost unparalleled for a laptop, with five USB ports, full 5.1 audio outputs, DVI, HDMI ports and a Blu-ray player, but it doesn’t work quite so well as a laptop. It’s big, bulky, has very poor battery life and less processing power than some laptops costing half as much. Even factoring in the powerful graphics card, it’s still poor value compared to more well-rounded models from other manufacturers.