First quad-core laptop hits U.S.
(Credit:
Xtreme Notebooks)
Never mind that there's little-to-no software that can take advantage of four processing cores, Xtreme Notebooks has released the first quad-core laptop in the U.S. With no mobile quad-core parts in existence, the Xtreme 917V Accelerator turns to desktop CPUs, giving you a choice between the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the Q6700. Pricing starts at $3,359. Other niceties on this gaming laptop/mobile workstation include: a glossy widescreen 17-inch display (up to 1920x1200 resolution), one or two Nvidia GeForce Go 8700M GT or 7950 GTX graphics cards, and up to three hard drives in RAID 0, 1 or 5 configurations. It ships with 4.1 speakers (yes, this beast has a subwoofer), a Webcam, and a hefty 12-cell battery, while giving you the option to add a Blu-ray drive, a TV tuner, and 11n Wi-Fi. You can outfit it with XP or Vista or opt out of a preloaded OS entirely. Xtreme Notebooks quotes a system weight of 12.5 pounds.
It all adds up to an unquestionably powerful laptop, but I'd like to know what the Xtreme 917V Accelerator sounds like when it's cooling a desktop CPU, two video cards, and three hard drives. I retired an old Dell laptop last year that used a Pentium 4 desktop chip; the thing was not what you'd call quiet.
Hopefully, our request for a review unit will be met with a positive response. Ideally, the Xtreme 917V Accelerator will occupy a spot in our labs right next to the diametrically opposed Asus Eee PC.
(Via Laptoping.com)
laptop. That weighed twenty pounds. What about this?
A desktop processor, three hard drives, a Blu-Ray Tray, etc. Some laptops
have 2 hard drive bays, but I haven't seen three. A quad-core... nobody could
need that kind of power! That's crazy.
Even with that kind of power, who'd buy it? If you needed so much, you
might as well as buy a Mac Pro with the quad core 3.0 Ghz instead. At least
that's upgradable and more powerful for the buck. Dang... again, that's just
insane.
Anyway, besides that, a faster dual-core CPU will way outperform a slower quad-core in single-threaded cases. Why would you need 4 cores unless you're running 4 demanding programs at once?
Eurocom offers a similar system, probable 12 cell battery, battery last only 40 minutes with light usage.
As its a laptop, bios will probably not allow overclocking, it doesn't offer the newer QX6850 with 1333 FSB, and enen if it does in future, Q6850's performance will probably be easily bypassed by the the next gen quad Penryn processor or the dual core CPU one generation on. Intel santa rosa's dynamic acceleration (IFA) is better if working with single threaded apps as it shuts a core and increase the frequency of the other, I would think that for 2007, getting a santa rosa X7800 is a better choice, quad core is over kill and does not seem to offer very signifiant performance gain in common apps relative to its cost or power usage. Conroe microarchitecture is probably only suppose to be used dual core, quad core introduces performance bottleneck... and Penryn will not offer the kind of performance increase that we saw when core 2 replaced P4...
8700m GT is just a significantly overclock 8600m, its 128 bit mem creates bitter sense of irony as it says on nVidia's roadmap to be for enuthastics; nVidia's 8 series's high benchmark in 3Dmark 05 and 06 simply does not realistically reflect its performance, its performance is overated if you only take 3Dmark into perspective, at XVGA res, it may perform near a 7950 GTX go, as the res goes up to 1920x1200, 8700m perform more like a underclocked 7800 GTX go goving it in SLi won't do better; despite it supports DirectX 10, it is not meant to replace 7950 GTX, in acturality, its more like a 7700 Go, and DirecX 10 will probably be short-lived as 10.1 standard is going to be supported by R700...
As sweet as this laptop is, i'd probably like to see it to be eqiuipped with AMD's new gen desktop processor and option for the forthcoming ATi flagship mobile cards therefore, i pass on this offer...
- A Little fact about multi-cores...
- by Wild Eep August 21, 2007 9:08 AM PDT
- Currently, most programs don't use TWO cores to their full extent, so why would
- Reply to this comment
-
(6 Comments)we want four??? (A better question would be: if the computer is for gamers, why
would they even bother offering vista)