I’ve always thought of extremely powerful laptops as more of a boy’s toy kind of thing. Let me explain why. The vast majority of people use laptops for net surfing, watching movies and listening to music. A select number of people also use laptops for software that’s harsh on system requirements, for gaming or for some serious multitasking. For the last category of people, most high end laptops (for the most part consisting of desktop replacements) will do just fine. This means that an exceptionally buffed laptop is only being manufactured for the creating company to gain bragging rights (‘hey, we made the most powerful laptop, yay!) and for the computer enthusiast who would like to own what’s currently best on the market, for a short period of time, obviously, judging by the way technology is constantly evolving. But what about institutions, governments, people in software development or architects? Don’t they need better?
Eurocom is not a well known manufacturer on the portable computer market. In fact, some people may not have heard of Eurocom at all. The Canadian company presents itself as number one in offering desktop replacement netbooks, and yes, it sports a large number of high quality products (even though I first confused them with a british game developer specializing in Nintendo that bares the exact same name).
Eurocom’s latest achievement, the Panther 2.0 might just have what it takes to get the title of ‘world’s fastest notebook’. Except for the fact that it’s not really a notebook. While I might be wrong, notebooks were, back in the day, light, portable computers, generally thinner than laptops. The Panther 2.0 has a 17.3 inch screen with a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution and weighs ‘as little as’ 11.66lbs and it’s anything but small and light. The weight of this desktop replacement is however justified by all the hardware it holds inside. Eurocom has presented this laptop as the “World’s first workstation class professional super-notebook” which should allow users to run high-end graphics as well as CAD software.
Moving on to the specification list, it truly is impressive. The Panther 2.0 offers Intel’s Core i7 Extreme Edition or Xeon 5600 as processor options, ATI Radeon HD5870 or Nvidia GTX480M graphics cards in SLI/CrossFire X and support for up to four hard drives, in RAID configurations, which provide a maximum storage capacity of 4TB. The whopping 4TB this laptop offers exceeds what’s currently being offered with most desktops and perhaps even servers. The laptop can also handle up to 24GB of memory. Extra features include a 3.0 megapixel web camera, optical drive of choice and all the connectivity you’ve ever wanted such as ExpressCard, WiFi, HDMI, two USB 3.0 ports, three USB 2.0 ports and more. I’m not sure what run time the battery on this particular laptop can offer which such high performance hardware, but since it’s heavy enough to be kept on the desk 99 percent of the time, you might as well keep it plugged so it won’t matter. Eurocom has already announced that it’s taking pre-orders for this desktop replacement.
It’s a server or workstation-calibre computer complete with built-in Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) in a 12 pound notebook form factor,” said Mark Bialic, President of Eurocom. “This is one extremely fast notebook that offers server or workstation calibre capabilities. It is designed to replace traditional desktop based workstations. It offers incredibly high ROI by allowing companies to be more productive and offer new “on the go” CAD/CAM services while greatly reducing overall IT management costs”.
The Panther 2.0 will most likely start shipping later this month. A base configuration will retail for somewhere around $2999 (at least this is the price currently shown by Eurocom’s system configuration tool) while the top of the line should easily pass the $8600 mark. The operating system is offered separately (your choice of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008) and obviously costs extra. Oh yes, and this laptop is obviously not for anyone. Eurocom has already established a potential market comprised of Manufacturing, Education, Financial institutions, Governments, Military and software development customers.
