Rock Extreme 840 SLI

As you might expect from a machine that houses two NVIDIA GTX280M Graphics cards the 840 SLI from Rock stretches the boundaries of what can be considered a laptop. The thought of carrying this monster more than a very short distance without a forklift truck makes me feel queasy. Weighing in at a shade under 6kg this is definitely a desktop replacement.

The 840 SLI is a slab of a machine based on a Clevo chassis that is well built if not terribly beautiful.

Blue Ray Bonanza

To be fair it is difficult to make anything other than a slab when you have to incorporate a massive 18.4” screen which is a quality item providing full HD 16:9 at a resolution of 1920×1080.

The SLI configuration of the two GTX 280M cards provides astounding performance allowing you to run pretty much any title with all the bells and whistles turned on and the resolution wound right up.

When both the GPU’s are crunching polygons there is a lot of fan noise and forget using it on battery power!

To back up the graphics card the Rock 840 SLI ships with Intel Core 2 Extreme processors.

If you opt for the nuts version then you get the QX9300 running at 2.53Ghz as well as 4Gb of DDR3 RAM, Three yes three 500GB 7200 rpm Hard disk drives, a blue ray drive and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.

This little lot will set you back three and a half grand though and there are various lesser options which can bring the price down to around £2300.

Overall the Rock 840 SLI is a solid, well performing desktop replacement gaming monster. There have been complaints about the trackpad as it is flush with the case and difficult to use but we can’t see many people using it with anything other than a standard USB mouse.

For more information on specification and prices visit rockdirect.com