PC Nextday Zoostorm 4-5701 review

PC Nextday's Zoostorm is a large desktop replacement notebook. It's powerful in Windows and can also play 3D games.

FEATURES

The Zoostorm's 17" display has a native resolution of 1,440x900 pixels, giving plenty of room to open several windows at once. But our image tests found some weaknesses. Its backlighting was a little uneven and the screen isn't very bright at its highest setting. It also has a grainy finish. The large chassis allows room for a full keyboard with number pad, but the keys don't travel far when pushed. The touch pad is large but, like the keyboard, its buttons feel indistinct. With a notebook this size, most people will want to use a mouse.

The chassis has plenty of ports spread around its edges, including an S/PDIF audio output that'll connect to a surround-sound decoder. Inside, an 80GB hard disk provides plenty of space for your files.

PERFORMANCE

The Zoostorm is the only notebook here that uses Intel's new Core 2 Duo T7200 processor. This made it the fastest notebook by some margin, scoring an impressive 158 overall in our application benchmarks. It has enough power to take on the toughest tasks.

It's also capable of running modern 3D games. The ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 chipset managed a playable 31.7fps in our Doom 3 benchmark, so it'll play the latest games with slightly reduced detail settings. Larger notebooks tend to fare badly in our battery life tests, but the Zoostorm ran for an impressive three hours and 27 minutes. This is good enough for regular mobile use, but at 3.3kg the Zoostorm is a bit too heavy for regular travelling.

Author: Seth Barton