ITC Millennia 7300

ITC's Millenia 7300 a big machine. In fact, at 5.6kg it's possibly the heaviest and thickest note­book we've come across: it borders on ridiculous. However, it also wields Nvidia's red-hot GeForce Go 6800 PCI Express (PCIe) graphics controller (with 256MB of DDR memory) and a 3.6GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading (supported by 1GB of 533MHz dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM).

These are truly desktop-level specifications, and their test results reflect this. To gauge productivity application performance we ran PC WorldBench 5 and SYSMark 2001, which returned top-level scores of 88 and 313, respectively. However, it was the 7300's graphics score of 16924 in 3DMark 2001 that blew us away.

The end result: this is a great notebook for gaming. When you see Half-Life 2 running on the 17" display, with its glossy coating and maximum resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels, you'll be amazed. Better still, the graphics controller is upgradeable, as is the memory, its two 80GB 5400rpm SATA hard disks (configured with RAID 0) and built-in analog TV tuner. The latter comes with a remote control and all the software you need to record and timeshift TV, plus it adds an S-Video input to the standard TV-out connection.

A 640 x 480 Web camera is also built into the top-centre of the display and there's a DVI port for attaching an external monitor--you receive a VGA adapter in the box. The 7300 features one serial, parallel, FireWire and PS/2 port. It also has two FireWire and four USB 2.0 ports along with an integrated multi-card reader and support for one Type II/I PC Card.

A multiformat (including double-layer) DVD writer and Nero 6 are included for backups. The notebook is so thick that there's an option for a second optical drive. Other options include built-in 802.11g wireless networking and Bluetooth.

Audio is also well catered for, with booming stereo speakers and an underside subwoofer. An S/PDIF audio output is provided for external speakers. There are also buttons and a bright LCD on the front fascia for MP3/CD playback without Windows.

This sizeable notebook delivers big performance, but it can get quite hot underneath and it struggled to keep its head above water for an hour in our worst-case-scenario battery tests.