back to article Eurocom Panther 2.0 Core i7, SLI notebook

While currently every notebook manufacturer seems to offering the thinnest, lightest and easiest to carry around notebook ever, in a bizarre way, it’s quite refreshing to find a company wandering off message and offering notebooks at the other end of the scale. Enter Eurocom’s Panther 2.0, the heaviest, most amazingly specified …

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  1. JDX Gold badge

    Quick battery question

    You'd expect it to go flat very fast when using all that grunt for games, etc. But why does simply playing a DVD burn up the juice? Inefficient DVD player or is it just the basline usage of all those components being turned on all the time?

    1. John Riddoch

      Component choices

      As it's using a desktop CPU, it won't have a lot of the power saving features you'd expect on a laptop. As such, the base power draw on it will be pretty massive unless you tweak stuff in the BIOS (e.g. underclock the CPU). Three drives will also suck up power more than a single one, even if they are SSD. 17" screen will draw more power than a 13-15" model, the graphics options aren't chosen for their power efficiency either.

      Many high-end laptops struggle to get an hour of battery life, so 40 mins on a DVD isn't that shocking.

      This isn't a laptop I'd be interested in, but to each their own.

    2. Mark 65

      With regards batteries in these sorts of machines, it's better to view them as an inbuilt UPS in which case 30+ minutes isn't bad.

  2. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Boffin

    Oh dear

    Finally a note book which can just about handle one of our smaller satellite images (1.0 GIGApixel). Now I want one.

    1. foo_bar_baz
      Happy

      Notebook

      A printed volume weighing 5.3 kilograms is in the tome-encyclopaedia range. In computer terms it's almost pushing into portable-luggable territory. Calling it a laptop is already tenuous, deffo not a notebook.

      </nitpick>

  3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Raid 0?

    Good luck when one of those drives goes tits up.

    Why does anyone think Raid-0 is a good idea?

    It might have been once upon a time with some slow HDD's but with SSD's?

    Really....

    1. Paul Johnston
      Joke

      A Guess

      Assuming most laptop disk failures come from mechanical shock i.e. dropping the thing how many people will dare drop a 5K laptop?

    2. Gordon 10

      Different strokes for different folks. In my experience people running raid 0 are willing to take the risks for the benefits and are well aware regular backups are mandated. I certainly am and have been running a pair of x18m's that way for 3 years.

    3. JC_

      Is there much difference between running multiple SSDs in RAID 0 and just one big SSD by itself? Aren't bigger SSDs faster because the controller can read & write to more chips simultaneously, which is basically the same thing as RAID 0 across multiple smaller drives?

      1. lurker

        @ JC_

        RAID-0 works the same for SSDs as HDDs. You're right that internally SSDs already work in a manner similar to RAID0 by simultaneously reading/writing to NAND, but there's nothing stopping a RAID controller running reading/writing data to three SSDs simultaneously and thereby getting close to triple the seq. read and write rates.

        You could of course get similar results by having triple the number of NAND chips in a single drive and an internal controller handling them, but they simply wouldn't fit in a standard form-factor drive at the moment, and you're looking at a very custom SSD there, much more expensive than using standard SSDs and a raid controller.

        Sequential read/writes are to some extent just epeen numbers anyway really, the major benefit is the near-zero latency and the massive increase in IOPs vs a mechanical drive.

    4. Piro Silver badge
      WTF?

      I respectfully disagree

      3x RAID0'd SSDs is going to give you obscene performance figures.

      RAID0'd SSDs show extreme, and almost linear performance increases.

      750GB is a trivial amount to back up onto a good old fashioned magnetic disk anyway. Who cares if it goes tits up, you should be backing up. The performance on offer will be amazing.

  4. PassiveSmoking
    WTF?

    you'd think for 5 grand they'd build its case out of a material that doesn't look so cheap and bloody nasty. It looks like something from the mid-90s!

    Also possibly not a smart purchase if you have back trouble.

    1. Van

      They could have had it Gold plated at Goldgenie for about 3 grand. See the problem there? Or do you want composite materials? Plain old metal is so 1950s.

  5. Norphy

    Battery life

    For a measly half hour of battery life, you have to wonder why they bother including a battery at all. Why not take it out, market it as portable rather than mobile and stick more stuff in it?

    1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
      Trollface

      They could just rename the battery as an integral UPS !

      1. mr-tom
        Unhappy

        Darn

        You got there ahead of me.

    2. mr-tom
      Happy

      Keep the battery

      It'll serve as a good UPS

  6. Dom 3

    "Begs the question".

    Just don't use it. If you use it correctly, you confuse most people, and if you use it incorrectly, you annoy the hell out of the rest of them.

    If anybody here *does* buy one of these things - why not get in touch with the editors? I think quite a lot of us would be interested in knowing what it is that you do that requires so much portable power.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      re: "Begs the question"

      Why buy one? I really wanted one but went Alienware instead (see other post) as I develop large corporate client/server style applications. The best way of demonstrating something to a potential client that I've found is to have one very powerful machine running an entire enclosed network of VMs simulating a section of their real network. I can show up with a single fully tested environment, have it up and running inside of 10 minutes and demonstrate it without having to worry about whether they have a fast enough connection (and will give me access to it) to be able to access my full development environment remotely.

      I know other people who use similarly specced mobile workstations for developing 3D content for clients and will do last minute tweaks to complex animations sitting with the client at their premises.

      Being (looking, at least) more efficient when sat infront of a client is usually justification enough for the extra weight, poor battery life, etc.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Was considering one of these ...

    although admittedly not a fully loaded one, but ended up going for Alienware instead because Eurocom were insisting that the only way I could pay for it was by a an international bank transfer as I wasn't in Canada. As there was talk on various forums (from a couple of years ago) that some of the Eurocom machines were coming off the production line in a less than perfect state with varous intermittent problems, buying a PC from another continent without even the basic protection I'd get from putting it on a credit card was just too much of a risk.

    Eurocom - please start trading like a reputable international company before I need to do my next upgrade as I really want one!

  8. John A Blackley

    I stopped reading at

    'Windows 7'

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seems strange they're called Eurocom, but they're a Canadian company. Are they ashamed of the fact?

    1. Lamont Cranston

      Probably for the benefit of US customers.

      Afterall, Mexico is part of Europe.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Mine's....

    ....bigger than yours. :-P

    Seriously, £5k? Ouch.

  11. Big Bear
    Go

    @John A Blackley

    So that was at the end of the send page (out of three)? What were your impressions up to that point? What was it about the machine that excited you, or, conversely, aggravated you? It's a shame that you stopped, as the third page of the article has some impressive benchmarking scores, especially around the video card capabilities of the system, as well as some information on the paltry battery life... I would think that this is pertinent information for any prospective buyer, rather than childishly whinging about the operating system. Incidentally, about 5 seconds into a visit to their website, easily found via the search engine of your choice, within the OS of your choice, running the browser of your choice, you might see this:

    Operating Systems: Windows 7; Server 2008R2; VMware; Red Hat

    Gee, that weren't so hard were it?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Someone had to ask.....

    .... but will it run Crysis?

  13. Muckminded

    "Just what does a £5k laptop get you these days?"

    A kickass computer with a horrid name, apparently.

    1. Robert E A Harvey
      Thumb Down

      And pathetic screen resolution

  14. AlfieFan

    Eurocom Panther

    This looks like an awesome workstation, just skimmed over benchmarks and I want one w/ SLi "for work". ;)

    How reliable are they would you recommend them? I dont have 5K to spend does Eurocom offer any kind of discounts?

  15. robamb2002

    Clevo P270WM

    If you are interested in this laptop, It is a rebrand of the Clevo P270WM and many different resellers will be carrying it shortly (within a month) Eurocom is a company who resells these systems, much like Sagernotebooks.com, Xoticpc.com and Malibal.com. The reason Eurocom gets the hats off is they are usually the first to post Pre-Orders for the Clevo machines. though they are not necessarily the first to ship (I beleive that goes to Sagernotebooks.com while price usually goes to either xoticpc or malibal depending on configuration)

    Just my two cents after doing massive research on ODMs and OEMs and where your laptops really come from.

  16. Mark Barker

    5k GBP for a laptop?

    At damn near eight grand US there's no way in hell it'd sell.

    Maybe a gamer with unlimited capital?

    ....and people say _MacBooks_ are over priced! {grin}

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