Review: Novatech X1 Pro

Novatech is a UK manufacturer known for its high-end gaming systems. Its X1 Pro (£2724 inc. VAT) boasts a wealth of high-end components built into a stylised chassis that delivers performance and multimedia functionality – but at a price.

The 18.4-inch screen is enormous and also extremely detailed. This is because it features a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and so supports high-definition (HD) content natively. Blu-ray films look fantastic. It’s not an exceptionally bright screen, however, and the shiny Super-TFT screen coating causes irritating reflections in bright light. Novatech has used very high-powered components.

The Intel Core 2 Duo processor is suitably fast and we had no trouble running high-powered, resource intensive applications concurrently. The two GeForce GTX 280M graphics cards in place are nVidia’s latest top of the range GPUs. They’re set up in an SLI configuration, which allows the laptop to draw on the power of both cards at once to provide phenomenal gaming power. There’s also 2048MB of dedicated video memory on board and, when we tried a variety of extremely resource-intensive games, the X1 handled them all without issue.

Alongside a standard 500GB hard drive, the laptop features a 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD) which is a lot quicker than the aforementioned disk. Running software from the SSD – while your data sits on the HDD – helps the machine to run faster.

The 6kg chassis is a generic one, which enables money to be spent on other areas of the machine. It’s very shiny, although it doesn’t collect fingerprints easily and looks great. A bank of touch-activated hotkeys provide quick access to volume controls, as well as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi access, and you can even change the colour of the lights dotted around the chassis.

Thanks to the low-grade plastics used, the keyboard feels a little cheap but, despite a slight fl ex, it provides a decent enough action. There’s also room for a dedicated numeric pad and eight other customisable gaming buttons, the latter of which give you greater control over your games.

Connectivity is good, with Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi meaning a fast connection to networks for online gaming. There’s no VGA-out for analogue connections, but HDMI and DVI provide versatile connectivity to digital sources. Four USB ports, an eSATA interface and mini-FireWire round off the specification.

The Novatech X1 Pro is a great gaming rig with a classy design and seriously powerful components, but for similar money you could own a high-spec Alienware M17x (issue 128), which may be this laptop’s downfall.

For more information visit www.novatech.co.uk