LAN Pirates are a very new name on the UK scene, being an off-shoot of NS Optimum who mainly provide computers for schools, so they aren't alien to the world of system building. LAN Pirates themselves now offer a selection of performance PC's and notebooks, aimed to cater for the enthusiast in all of us. In today's market, enthusiast generally translates as high performance and an equally high price. This laptop is no different.

The specifications are excellent, being almost what you would expect from a desktop replacement machine, but in a light weight package. The processor is the much appreciated Pentium M, clocking in at 2GHz with 2MB of Level 2 cache. Using Speed Step, this goes right down to 600MHz when in an idle status, or when battery power is low. This means battery life can be anywhere from 2.5-5 hours depending on what you are doing.

The main chassis is a customized Asus M6N, which as you can see is quite something.

Our particular model had 512MB of CL2.5 PC2700. We were disappointed not to see PC3200 memory being used, to take advantage of the 400MHz FSB. The hard drive is a reasonable 80GB Fujitsu 4,200rpm model, but if this isn't enough, you can always free some space up using the 24x Toshiba CD-Writer/DVD Combo drive.

Coincidently, LAN Pirates is an anagram of LAN Parties, which is very much what it this machine is designed for. Under the hood we have the Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics processor with a 64MB frame buffer. This is now superceded by the Mobility Radeon 9700, but the only difference is a matter of clock speeds and power consumption as they are both 4 pipeline solutions, unlike the desktop equivalents.

This graphics chip would be nothing, without the beautiful widescreen 1280x800 display. With a diagonal measurement of 15.4", if you take the resolution into account, this is equivalent of a slightly cropped 17" TFT. The display really as amazing, with vivid colours, excellent contrast, viewing angle and little or no blurring. We would quite happily work with it all day. Although we couldn't get an official response time, we found it fine when playing demanding games such as Doom 3.

This notebook has a sleek look with hard edges that give it a Volvo-esque feel. For it's specification, the laptop is fairly light weight, weighing in at just over 3KG. For comparison, many ATX PSU's will weigh 2-3KG.

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