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Dual-core Athlon 64 X2 Laptop Reviewed

Posted by Zonk on from the if-you-still-haven't-gotten-me-a-gift-this-would-be-okay dept.

Steve from Hexus writes "Dual core finds its way inside a laptop (albeit a not-so-portable DTR) in the form of Rockdirect's Xtreme64. The DTR features an Athlon 64 X2 4800+, two 7200rpm hard drives and a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra GPU. HEXUS.net has a review of the laptop, one of the most powerful we've seen hit the market to date." From the article: "Rather than change a formula that works, Rockdirect has opted to stick with the Clevo D900-based chassis that its other performance-based laptops use. The obvious downsides are bulkiness and weight, with the laptop sitting almost 5cm high and weighing in at 5.7kg. It's a desktop replacement in the truest sense of the words, and with an 8kg travel weight (including charger and supplied carrying case) and relatively poor battery life, it's about as portable as a concrete slab."

11 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Tax advantage by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At my workplace we can salary sacrifice laptops but not desktops. This means you pay for the system out of your pre-tax income, which can make a good laptop cheaper than an equivalent desktop system.

    Its a silly rort, but it leads to people buying systems like this one because its portable.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
    1. Re:Tax advantage by undeadly · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Its a silly rort, but it leads to people buying systems like this one because its portable.

      It's also most likely sounds like a vacum cleaner due to fans needed to cool components in that constrained space.

  2. Just Wait by soda160289 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just wait until they start throwing server parts in there. Have you ever wanted to host a giant Oracle database ON THE GO?

  3. It has a parallel port by Saven+Marek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has anyone even seen any parallel port peripherals in the last 10 years?

    And then it skimps on firewire by only giving unpowered slow firewire 400

  4. These specs are indeed impressive... by Phariom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...but with a battery life like that of a goldfish, why bother? Seriously save yourself hundreds of dollars and just build a comparable desktop system.

    This isn't exactly the kind of system I would want to lug with me into a coffee shop either--it might break the damn table!

    The only practical application of such a portable system (give the cost) that I can think of would be somewhere in the applied sciences "out in the field." However, these specs barely conform to those that many such scientists would require.

    I'll admit this, though: I would love to take this bad boy to a LAN party! Perhaps that's the target market they've been looking for.

    1. Re:These specs are indeed impressive... by sessamoid · · Score: 4, Insightful
      What's the battery life of a goldfish?

      Probably about as long as an African swallow can carry a coconut.

      --
      "No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
    2. Re:These specs are indeed impressive... by rapidweather · · Score: 3, Funny

      Goldfish are indeed tough.
        I had a goldfish pond, and the cats used to fish them out, but usually walk away. Hours later, I would put the fish back in the pond, and after a while, it would recover. Big rain storms would wash some of them out, same result and cure.
      Winter brought ice to the pond, I just took a rock and broke the ice every morning, so they could get oxygen from the surface of the water. The cold water did not harm them at all.
      Kind of like a good car battery that starts the car at 5 degrees below zero.
      They ate insects that jumped into the pond during the summer, I did not have to feed them except during winter.
      Put some Water Hyacinths in there, and the goldfish lay their eggs on the roots, and eventually, you have little goldfish swimming around. Those that survived (again, references to battery life), replaced the older fish that died. Goldfish, in their own way, are way tougher than almost any battery. If you decide to raise them, be sure to give them a really big pond, and make it at least 5 feet deep. If you make a concrete pond, let it cure a good long while before adding the fish. Use a half-round concrete drain pipe 12 inch round or so for the bottom, with sloping sides, so you can syphon out the waste material from the resulting trough with a garden hose. Locate the pond out in the open, so they get full sunlight all day long, if possible. You may plant some shrubs on the south and west side if the sun is too strong in the afternoon. Don't put the pond on the north side of a house or fence. If you do all that, you will have some of the goldfish outlive any laptop computer. You don't have to buy goldfish, just wait till a neighborhood kid gets some for free somewhere, and offer to give it a good home. By the way, Goldfish come with their own fishtank screensaver!

      --
      Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
  5. Dual core... by nurhussein · · Score: 5, Funny

    So you can cook both of your balls at once.

    1. Re:Dual core... by nurhussein · · Score: 4, Funny
      The stories about balls cooking are highly exaggerated. Only make sure you watch out when you slam down the lid! ;-)
      I don't see how it's a problem unless you rest your family jewels on the touchpad.
  6. Re:Who buys these? by TallMatthew · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I don't understand the market for these sort of laptops. At almost 6kg, this is approaching the portability level of my desktop PC, especially since with its battery life of one hour you're still effectively tethered to power supplies anyway. And for this 'privilege' you pay far, far more than you would for an equivalent desktop system. So, where's the market?

    One assumes it's easier to lug this laptop around than a desktop and a monitor and its specs make it desktop comparable, thus the moniker DTR. Using the same machine at home as you do at work makes life easier, as does taking said machine on the road. If they seldom are used without their umbellical power cords, battery life is a nonissue. This isn't a "work on a plane" laptop, clearly.

    As for why it has to be this beefy, well simply because it can. The majority of machines today are overkill for what people use them for. Video editing requires certain specs, but for most people the limits of a machine never come into question. If you've decided your laptop won't be used that often away from a desk, and you make a purchasing decision based on the most bang for your buck, and if this is being paid for by your employer, then why not get the most powerful one? That's what they're banking on.

  7. Re:Does it matter? by hattig · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yeah, the system has two cores in it, but the term dual-core really means a single chip with two processor cores on it, connected via something (the cache, the on-chip arbiter or whatever) and then attaching to the rest of the system via a single interface.

    AMD's processors are dual-core as they connect via an on-chip arbiter, the SRQ. They then connect to the rest of the system via a HyperTransport link. AMD's next core revision, the F-Step, will have 4 core connections from the SRQ, allowing for future quad-core processors.

    Intel's current 'dual-core' processors aren't really dual-core as they connect to the FSB independently. Indeed Intel's latest Presler processors have separate dies on the processor packaging. In practice however it doesn't really matter that much, so they get away with calling it 'dual-core' when it is technically SMP on a chip. Yonah will be Intel's first true dual-core processor because the cores are connected at the L2 cache level, which they share.

    So now people defined the number of cores a processor has by the number of cores per socket in the system. In your system you have one core per socket, so the processors are single core, the system is dual-processor. In the reviewed laptop there are two cores in one socket, for the system is single-processor, but the processor is dual-core. Quite simple really.