1. Introduction & First Impressions

Earlier this year Tom's Hardware Guide reviewed the Mayhem G1 from ABS Computers. Equipped with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600, an Intel 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 processor, Hitachi 7200 RPM 60 GB hard drive and a host of other features, their first generation notebook was at the head of the class. Since that article, many other competitors have entered the arena. The question has now become a simple one: how well does the third generation Mayhem notebook stand up to these new entries?

Relatively thin but it packs a punch.

The first thing we noticed about the Mayhem G3 was how much it weighed. Coming in a hair over eight pounds for the notebook and an additional pound and a half for the power adapter, this is no featherweight. The second thing we took note of was its speed. The G3 has an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ with a core clock speed of 2.2 GHz and 1 GB of DDR 400; I have a similar setup in my gaming box at home. Being able to take the power of your desktop with you in the form of a laptop is an exciting proposition. But only benchmarks and game play will be able to show how well it works in the real world.