MV Ixius 15 review

The PCI Express standard for notebooks has brought notebook graphics chipsets into line with their desktop counterparts, and some notebooks have 3D performance to rival that of a PC.

Most gaming notebooks are huge, heavy monsters, but MV has tried to squeeze a lot of gaming power into a smaller package.

The Ixius 15 is not the most attractive notebook we have seen. The chassis is covered in bumps but it feels solid with good-quality plastic around the keyboard and screen. The base is very thick but has plenty of ports: the Ixius has four USB2.0 sockets, FireWire and parallel, PS/2 and serial legacy connectors. A multibay on the left has separate card readers for CF, SD, SM, MS and MMC cards, but you can replace this with hot-swappable modules for an extra hard disk, battery, DVD writer or floppy drive. Bluetooth is also built in for connecting devices such as mice or mobile phones.

The notebook has a good keyboard with keys that have plenty of travel but not much feedback. The touch pad has an odd semicircular design but is comfortable to use. The 15" screen has a higher-than-average resolution of 1,400x1,050 pixels and a high level of contrast, suiting it well to the dark and moody atmosphere of games such as Doom 3. The display is less adept at displaying photos, as colours lack vibrancy. The notebook is a kilogram lighter than MV's Ixius 17, which we reviewed in Labs, Shopper June 2005, but 4.5kg is still too much weight to carry comfortably. Battery life is also abysmal at 81 minutes, but this is to be expected from a notebook with a desktop processor.

The Ixius 15 has a 3.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor rather than the 3.4GHz version in its bigger brother, the Ixius 17. However, it performed almost as well in our benchmark tests, achieving very high scores in PCMark04 and the Shopper benchmarks. 3D performance is also stunning. It coped admirably with 3DMark03, and managed a silky-smooth 50.7fps in Doom 3 with 4x anti-aliasing switched on.

MV's Ixius 15 may be heavy and the styling won't be to everyone's taste, but it's a very powerful notebook that is perfect for taxing 2D tasks and the latest games. It is also very good value at £1,100, making it around £300 cheaper than other notebooks with equivalent gaming power.