Seeing a couple of 20in notebooks at Computex (Issue 105, page 14) slightly lessened the impact of this 19in Metabox monster landing in our Labs, but this is a notebook with presence. It’s a whopper.

The Clevo chassis may look plasticy but it’s very sturdy and the lid provides a great deal of protection to the 19in 1680 x 1050 screen. The screen itself is well lit, sharp, bright and offers good viewing angles. The Windows Desktop was crystal clear and colours looked great when gaming and watching HD films. However, some lag was noticeable in fast moving sequences. The speakers are very good for a notebook: loud and punchy with some good bass. The keyboard is full size and has a separate number pad and the trackpad mouse is good too.

But the 590K is all about power and brute force. But it only sports AMD’s fastest (old-gen) single-core mobile chip the 2.4GHz Turion ML-44, not the new X2 dual core processors. There’s also 2GB of RAM and an excellent 7200rpm 100GB hard disk. An overall 2D benchmark score of 1.01 is fast considering points were dropped in the multitasking test thanks to the single core. But it’s still one percent faster than our speedy reference PC.

But its 3D performance is where the M590K should shine thanks to two (old-gen) Geforce GO 7800 GTX chips running in SLI. It certainly did, as average framerates of 31.6fps and 34.1fps in our high-setting tests of Far Cry and Call of Duty 2 testify.

ITC and Clevo seem to have thought of everything else too. 802.11b/g WLAN and Bluetooth are included along with Gigabit Ethernet, S/PDIF in and out, a DVI port, an AV port for component, composite and S-Video output and even a serial port. Add to this a 1.3 megapixel webcam and a memory card reader, which supports SD/MMC cards and Memory Sticks and there’s very little missing.

Naturally portability is a downside. Battery life hovers around one-and-a-half hours no matter what you do with it. At 6kg, it’s not something you’d want to carry around… much. That said, we are impressed with the included rucksack carry bag which offers decent padding.

If the beast breaks down, there’s ?a one year collect and return warranty. Naturally we’ve never seen anything quite like this Metabox but it’s not quite in a league of its own. Dell’s 17-inch XPS M1710 (Issue 104, page 38) costs almost $600 more than the Metabox but offers cutting edge components which made it 20 percent faster at 2D applications and similar 3D performance. It also offers better styling and Dell’s Premier 3-year onsite support. However, if you want 19 inches of beast, while this is the only choice, it’s also a good choice.