Preview: Pioneer Dreambook Power M57

What's big, portable and makes your gaming rig cry?

Ignore the generic chassis for a minute. Inside the unassuming silver case is Intel's new Core2 Duo, which has only just begun showing up in the hands of resellers, where they are promptly devoured by ravenous performance junkies. It's the T7200 model, which runs at 2GHz.

Craig's putting it through its paces at the moment, and you can read more about it in Atomic issue 69. In the meantime, rest assured that the rest of the hardware does the processor justice. There's an Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GTX, 2GB of RAM, 100GB 7200RPM hard drive and a 17" monitor with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200. All the cool additional laptop features are included, like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a PC card slot and card reader. Hell, there's even a serial port, IR and a TV tuner.

From the outset if feels solid, but there are a few places where you can tell cost cutting has been going on. The speakers are tinny and part of the Wi-Fi antenna is poking out the top of the TFT bezel. It's not all bad news though, the hinge on the monitor is extremely solid. It's small enough that you won't need a pair of roadies to wheel it around in a road case behind you, but using laptops at this end of the performance scale means that you don't feel like you're forced to skimp on the things you get in a normal desktop. Like a full size number pad and generous keyboard, for instance.

It's still early days for Core2 Duo in laptops, and even though we don't cover them often, it's nice to see them rivaling most high end gaming rigs. This puts it in the company of the monster Dell M1710, which we'll pit it against in the next issue of Atomic.