If ever there was an apt name for a notebook then Rock's Xtreme SL8 family of hardcore gaming notebooks wears it with pride. There is nothing subtle about any of them: fast performing, huge in stature and colossal in weight, the Xtreme SL8s live up to their billing, especially our review sample, the current flagship of the range, the XSL8-9550.

There's no namby-pamby mobile processor powering this beast. What you get is a full-blown Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, desktop, quad core CPU clocked at 2.83GHz. Built on a 45mn process, it has an FSB speed of 1333MHz and the four cores share 12MB of L2 cache.

"But what about cooling?", we hear you cry. Well, it's not much of a problem when the notebook in question measures 394 x 299 x 60mm. And if you think that might be a bit big to cart around, then the weight of 5.5kg - without the whopping great power brick - should put any doubts to rest. Indeed, the Clevo D900C chassis is so big that there is room for an SLI graphics setup and three hard drives, but more on those later.

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Backing up the processor is an Intel P965/ICH8R chipset combination and 4GB of PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 memory. That's certainly enough to keep the installed Windows Vista Home Premium OS happy, but should you feel the need for more the motherboard supports up to a maximum of 8GB.

As you can imagine, the XSL8-9550 has plenty of grunt, indeed it's the fastest laptop we have ever tested, certainly living up to its marketing slogan of ‘the world's fastest laptop' by scoring 8,710 marks in PCmark05. This also makes it one of the fastest PCs we've ever tested, never mind just notebooks.

When it comes to graphics performance it doesn't hang about either: not surprising when it is driven by a pair of Nvidia GeForce Go 9800M GTX cards, each with 1GB of GDDR3 set up in an SLI configuration, giving an amazing (for a notebook) 3DMark06 score of 15,131 when tested at 1280 by 1024 pixels. The score only drops to 12,160 when tested at the screen's native 1920 by 1200 pixel resolution.

But how does it perform in the real gaming world? Well, using World in Conflict's built-in benchmark it produced an average frame rate of 48fps at 1280 by 1024, and that's with all the in-game detail settings set to maximum or very high.

The screen is excellent, a 17-inch WUXGA TFT panel with, as mentioned above, a 1920 by 1200 native resolution and an X-Glass coating; ideal for watching movies on via the Blu-ray drive or for playing games. The screen has extra protection built in as the lid has a brushed metal panel set into it, which sets off the gloss black external finish nicely.

As previously mentioned the chassis is big enough to house up to three hard drives which you can order built into a RAID array (750GB, 960GB or 1.5TB) but ours were set up as three individual disks. In our review system these were three 250GB, 7,200rpm Samsung disks which should allow for fast file transfers without any problems.

Most of the ports are built into the left-hand side of the chassis along with the optical drive: VGA out, 4-pin Firewire, modem and LAN (for the Gigabit Ethernet) ports, an Express card slot and a 7-in-1 card reader. The right-hand side just holds four USB 2.0 ports in two double stacks, while the rear of the chassis is home to a DVI port and an S-Video port.

Battery life for a notebook this big is pretty academic as it's destined to spend all its time plugged into the mains, but we tested it anyway and got around eighty minutes when watching a DVD and just over the hour using it for normal office applications. Thing of it as a UPS rather than a battery and you won't go far wrong...

Big and very powerful, Rock's Xtreme XSL8-9550 has performance figures that shame most desktops out there, but it does come a very large price tag. For gamers who attend a lot of LAN parties it is certainly easier to carry than a PC tower and monitor.