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Let’s remind ourselves what the notebook is like first by taking a short tour of the chassis.

The notebooks are very large affairs, weighing in at 3.8Kg with the battery. With a large 17in screen and cutting edge CPU and graphics it’s hard to view these two machines as anything other than desktop replacements.

I’m more used to smaller laptops so the size of these machines really hit me when first sitting in front of them. The weight is such that you won’t really want to carry these machines with you all the time. However, if you are looking for a tidy and compact way of having a machine that you can use for work and play then these are worthy of strong consideration.

The expansive lid on the Rock is taken up by a large ‘X’ etched into it, with the Rock logo set in the middle in silver. By contrast the AJP lid is a touch more discreet and smarter. The lid is held on by two clips and the left one can be locked.

Opening up the notebook you’ll find a large expanse taken up by a full size keyboard complete with a number pad on the right, which you rarely see on a laptop machine. This does mean that the keyboard is shifted slightly to the left but this is outweighed by the usefulness of the number pad. There’s little compromise with the size of the keys and I found that I was able to reach a good typing speed. However, it took some practice not to accidentally hit the trackpad. The trackpad does the job and the mouse buttons are adequate too with a four way jog pad in the centre.

At the bottom you’ll find a small LCD display, which indicated the time, battery states, and whether you have wireless switch on or not. To the left and right of this a number of buttons for directly controlling media player.

Towards the bottom right you’ll find a small icon next to a tiny hole indicating the presence of a microphone. The built in speakers run down the side of the keyboard and are averagely loud but are definitely not the clearest speakers you’ll hear – they’ll do for Skype conversations and general browsing but it’s not Hi-Fi. If you do like to Skype you’ll appreciate the fact that there’s a webcam integrated into the top of the screen bezel, saving you the expense, the hassle and the clutter of adding an external webcam – it’s there ready for when you need it.

The left hand side of the notebook only contains the 8-speed dual-layer DVD-ROM drive, to accompany the 100GB hard disc inside each machine. The right hand side is busier. You’ll find a PC Card slot covered by a clumsy removable flap, along with two USB ports a mini-FireWire connector and a memory card reader slot. There are also sockets for headphone and an external microphone should you wish to use a headset.

At the rear you’ll find two more USB ports, modem and Ethernet sockets and both S-Video and DVI display outputs. You’ll also find a serial and TV Tuner connectors.

On the display quality side, the Rock was noticeably brighter and clearer than the higher resolution AJP, which was duller and patchier – probably down to being an early sample.

The big differentiator then is really just the CPU – so how does it affect performance? To test we employed our new in house 2D SpodeMark benchmarks, which run a series of demanding tasks such as audio and video compression and image manipulation, both singly and at the same time to test multi-tasking performance, which dual-core CPUs are designed for.

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