We will start this review very differently from normal, by talking about the sheet size and weight of this machine. Having owned a 17 inch laptop I had been prepared to expect a slightly bigger machine, but nothing could prepare for what i saw upon opening the X780’s box. This machine has the same sort of footprint as a standard 17 inch machines, but it is incredibly tall. You are talking almost 2 inches here, and for a laptop that is a lot. I can assure you, ‘behemoth’ and ‘powerhouse’ are definitely apt ways of describing it (especially with the unit’s weight of ~4kg). It is a very good-looking machine. With a brushed metal lid, and what looks like carbon fibre bordering the keyboard, it looks smart.

It is obvious that all of this space is for the components, and the cooling they need, that make this laptop a state of the art quad core gaming machine, with some quite impressive specs.

• Intel Q9000 2.0Ghz Quad Core Processor
• NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS 512Mb DDR3
• 2GB DDR3 1066Mhz RAM
• 250GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
• 8x Dual Layer +/- DVD-RW
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• 17” 1920x1200px Glass Screen

You can see the power just bulging out of the machine.

‘rock are selling this machine as a ‘budget’ quad core gaming machine, but we are yet to see the ‘budget’ side of a £1699.00 price tag. Of course with spec like this we have to put the X780 through some benchmarks to test this power.
3DMark Vantage:  3768 Points
SuperPi Calculate 1million (19 iterations): 31.485 seconds

We also were able to play some games on this machine, such as Crysis and Red Alert 3. We have to say that Red Alert 3 was a dream to play, with no lagging or slowing. But we could ‘only’ play Crysis on medium, above this and it became unplayable. Even though, playing Crysis on Medium is no mean feat for a laptop.
At the time of writing rock are giving each buyer of an eXtreme series laptop a copy of ‘Assassins Creed’, something we did not receive with the review sample,; as well as a 30 day trial of the MMORPG Eve Online. These games will run very well on this machine, and should be a good baseline for seeing what it can do.

To go with this spec, we have a wide array of Inputs and Outputs:

• 4 x USB 2.0 + 1 x E-SATA
• 7-in-1 Card Reader
• 34mm Express Card Slot
• 1 x mini IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port
• HDMI Output
• DVI Output
• Headphone, Microphone, S/PDIF Output Jack
• 10/100/1000 Lan, 56k Modem, 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi

This plethora of ports will ensure you will be able to use pretty much any device with this machine without worrying. Moreover, for those of you who prefer your current monitor, there is a DVI to VGA adaptor in the box.
But with all this power and good, has to come some bad. And unfortunately there is quite a bit of it on the eXtreme 780. First is the weight. The sheer mass of this machine makes it very uncomfortable to use it on your lap for any period. Whilst recording this week’s bitcast, Andy was unable to keep the laptop on his lap for very long. This is not helped by the amount of heat generated by the powerful components in this machine.

Whilst looking very nice, the X780 does unfortunately dissappoint in some areas.

Second is the touchpad, which at times was almost unusable. It took a good few scrolls of the pad to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, and even then, it often did not respond to some strokes or scroll actions. When this is mixed with the painfully long, at times, boot time; it became almost painful to have to turn the machine on and launch a program.
So, we come to the matter of the price: £1,699 :O. This is a very expensive machine, with most similar machines either being Macs or a slightly better spec. Although there is no doubt that the components themselves make up the bulk of this price; once they have been combined they leave you with a product that does not seem to us to be truly worth the price. Unfortunately, it could just be that the unit we have received has faults (as I have seen before on many laptops); which have hindered our enjoyment of the product.

In conclusion I cannot give the X780 more than 3.5/5 due to some rather intrusive problems with the final product.