Verdict: A big budget blockbuster, but is it a box-office flop?
Unless they're advertising a Guy Ritchie/Madonna movie, film posters always come spattered with gushing quotes from critics. However, if the movie is a bit of a turkey then the PR company that sourced the quotes will have had to be quite devious. For example, a line in a review that says 'lots of cool locations and smash-bang action sequences, but these don't make the movie any less tedious' will be cut short at the comma before it's put on the poster. Should Evesham ever produce big posters to advertise its new laptop, the Quest A630, it might want to consult the people who produce movie posters to extract quotes from this review, because while there are positive aspects to the A630, there are also some serious downsides.
Firstly, the big selling point of the A630 is that it features SLI. It is, quite simply, completely crackers. It makes the Alienware Aurora m7700 - a laptop with a fully-fledged, Socket 939 Athlon 64 FX-57 inside - look restrained. To continue the movie theme, if the Alienware is a low-budget period drama set in Surrey then the A630 is a $300 million Hollywood blockbuster, starring Arnie and directed by James Cameron.
Lurking inside the A630's hulking plastic chassis are two GeForce Go 7800 GTX GPUs. The GeForce Go 7800 GTX is the first mobile GPU that bears comparison with the top desktop GPUs. It features the same 24 pixel processor/16 ROP pipeline design as Nvidia's GeForce 7800 GTX, and it runs at 400MHz, just 30MHz shy of the clock speed at which the desktop chip runs. Also, like a desktop SLI system, the A630 has two graphics cards, so each GPU has 256MB of GDDR3 RAM, clocked at 500MHz (1GHz effective).
Obviously, two graphics cards take up a lot of space, and the A630 is by far and away the biggest and ugliest laptop we've seen. To be fair, this isn't Evesham's fault, as the company told us there's only one laptop chassis in production that's large enough to hold the motherboard and two graphics cards. The pictures don't convey just how large it is; the chassis measures 470 x 340mm, and it weighs a spine-busting 6.6kg. Opening the lid is a surreal experience too; even though the keyboard is full-sized, the keys look tiny and lost, like some tiny starlet being hugged by John Goodman.
That said, it isn't designed to be portable. Like the Alienware, the A630 is a desktop replacement. It's for people who don't have room for a full-sized PC, or who want to be able to easily hide their monster rig in a cupboard when they're not using it. And when you think about the A630 as a desktop, rather than a portable computer, the super-sized chassis starts to make more sense. For example, it allows the A630 to have a massive 19in widescreen TFT with a squint-inducing native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 - the same as the CPC Premium Grade-approved 20in Belinea 10 20 35W TFT. The A630's panel is vibrant and sharp, and well suited for games, with no blurring and smearing. Viewing angles are also pretty good, although the screen is quite glossy and reflective.
Running two GeForce GPUs in SLI requires an nForce4 SLI motherboard, something we haven't seen in a laptop before. However, unlike the Alienware, the A630 doesn't have a Socket 939 CPU. Instead, it uses one of AMD's Socket 754 mobile chips, specifically, the AMD Turion 64 ML-44. This is AMD's top-end Turion, clocked at 2.4GHz with 1MB of Level 2 cache. However, despite its hefty specs, the Turion is still considered to be inferior to Intel's equivalent mobile CPU, the Pentium M, and it's certainly no match for the FX-57 inside the Alienware. However, as we discovered in our CPU Labs test, modern games rely more on GPU performance than CPU power, and with two Go 7800 GTX GPUs in SLI, the A630 doesn't lack firepower.
In addition to the Turion CPU, there's 1GB of PC2700 RAM, and a 100GB hard disk that spins at 7,200rpm. The on-board audio is AC97, and there's a dual-layer DVD writer, plus the usual LAN and WiFi options. The battery is huge, but in general use, you'll struggle to get more than a couple of hours out of it. And if you play games on the A630 without plugging in the enormous power brick, the battery will last about as long as Jennifer Aniston's movie career.
PERFORMANCE
If you skipped to this point after reading the intro, I don't blame you. Performance is what this laptop is all about, and although its power sometimes matches its Herculean dimensions, in other aspects, it proved to be strangely disappointing.
In desktop applications, the Turion CPU proved to be a surprisingly nippy performer, considering that it's a single-core chip, as it managed to outscore the dual-core 2.8GHz Pentium D 820 reference PC in the image editing and multitasking benchmarks. It was quicker overall than our Elite-listed gaming laptop, the Rock Xtreme CT, despite the Rock having a 2GHz Pentium M 760 CPU. The 2.4GHz Turion CPU powered the A630 to an overall Media Benchmarks score of 0.86, compared to the Rock's 0.74. The FX-57-powered Alienware showed both of these laptops the stage door, however, scoring 1.11 overall.
Gaming performance is where the A630 really needs to prove itself, however, and it was in this regard that the results were a bit mixed.
In Battlefield 2, at our standard test setting of 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and high AF, the A630 averaged 77fps. This is an excellent score, but it's only 10fps faster than the Rock with its single GeForce Go 7800 GTX. However, in F.E.A.R., at 1,280 x 960 with 2x AA and 2x AF, the A630 scored 77fps again, which is a more impressive 60 per cent faster than the Alienware. At its native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050, the A630 turned in a quick average of 59fps in F.E.A.R. with 2x AA, although the minimum frame rate often dipped into single figures. Like a second-rate actor who has forgotten his lines, this was possibly due to a lack of memory, as the hard disk could often be heard chugging away in an effort to load more data from the disk. Even disabling AA didn't help; clearly, running at maximum detail is a tough ask for this laptop.
Quake 4 and Need For Speed: Most Wanted both highlighted the main flaw of SLI, which is that it needs better game support. In Quake 4, at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 8x AF, the A630 averaged 51fps. This is a good score, but it's only as quick as the Alienware, which means that SLI provided literally no benefit. In Need For Speed, the average of 47fps at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF was again below par. As we found in our SLI vs CrossFire feature, it's a game that sees very little benefit from SLI, despite, ironically, being one of the few games that could really use it.
Playing games also results in the A630's fans spinning up, and they're incredibly loud. Laptops are supposed to be more discreet than desktops, but you'll really need to wear headphones while gaming on the A630, and for that matter, so will anyone else in the room.
CONCLUSION
The A630 is the fastest gaming laptop ever. End quote. It's also completely mad, and not in a good way. Its size is the least of its problems; the noise is a bigger issue, as even sitting idle in Windows, it isn't quiet. The fact that it has SLI is undeniably very cool, but this also causes problems, as the performance benefits are very hit and miss; some games will see huge boosts, while others will see nothing. Support for games will improve as new drivers are released, but Nvidia's GeForce Go drivers aren't updated as frequently as the drivers for the desktop GPUs.
The A630 is an impressive piece of kit, but we're not convinced that integrating SLI into a laptop is such a great idea. It's interesting to know that it's technically possible, but we still wouldn't want to live with the A630 as our main PC.
