The Civic Diamond 2015.xT is more than a little similar to Digital Star's PowerNote CL56 (reviewed November 2004, page 43), featuring the same OEM housing. Designed to take care of any application you can throw at it, it's a capable book that will handle DirectX 8 and 9 games, as well as churn through productivity apps.

Although getting the edge over the PowerNote by a mere eight marks in 3DMark01 SE's default 1024 x 768 resolution test, the two units managed exactly the same 6271 score when we added four samples of full-scene anti-aliasing to the mix -- interesting results given the Digital Star's 300MHz slower processor and half the amount of DDR RAM. The likely cause here is the difference in hard disk, with the Modtech using an above average 5400rpm disk, but still slower than the 7200rpm monster found in its competition.

We fired up our other staple benchmark PCMark04 and found some more interesting results, namely the nearly 500 point difference between the two units, the gap opening with Modtech featuring twice the memory with 1GB of included PC2100 memory and the small CPU increase.

A shortcoming of the choice of chassis means this notebook trades in the front-mounted speakers for a pair of side mounts, but in turn uses the optical bay to house speaker drivers. This results in the optical drive, in this case an 8-speed DVD burner being mounted facing outwards. Having the drive here makes it near impossible to open while lap operated but shouldn't be such a problem when used on the desktop.

Given the similarities of the two units, the $100 price variance makes it easy for us to recommend over the Digital Star. Even though the drive is marginally slower, the higher spec CPU, twice the RAM and an 80GB capacity.