1. Eurocom: From Gaming Notebooks To Mobile Workstations That Do Gaming

Things are getting pretty exciting at MobilityGuru these days. My rant asking if gaming notebook vendors were afraid of the site brought some positive responses from hot players in the field. It also elicited lots of suggestions from you guys. Between the responses and your input, things are moving quickly on the gaming notebook front. In fact, I'm discovering that many so called "gaming notebooks" have blossomed out into a new breed of very high powered mobile workstations that offer endless opportunities for graphically oriented users.

We're about to start testing Eurocom's D900K F-Bomb. This behemoth has a dual core AMD 64-bit processor, lots of memory and disk storage as well as a great Nvidia graphics processor. We're going to subject the D900K to a whole range of benchmarks, including some specifically designed for 64-bit hardware running Windows XP x64.

Eurocom calls the D900K F-Bomb a "mobile workstation" instead of simply a gaming notebook. I'm sure it's chosen this moniker at least in part because there's quite a bit of insecurity in the mobile computing market about the future of PC-based gaming, given all the hot new dedicated gaming boxes out there now and previewed at E3 this week.

I believe "mobile workstation" really is a better name for these monsters. They can do so much more than role playing as gaming consoles. The D900K is capable of 8 channel 7.1 audio, making it a great candidate for serious sound editing with the right application software. An optional external Windows XP Media Center Edition TV tuner opens the door for all kinds of broadcast, satellite and cable video-oriented stuff. And, video editing should be a pleasure on the D900K.

As a digital photography/PhotoShop junkie, I would love to have one of these spawn of Eurocom to lug around on my out-of-studio shoots. And designers and architects would be very happy to run their favorite applications on this workstation.

I almost forgot my friends in the special effects business. Companies like George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic now bring high powered AMD-based notebooks to the sets where the live-action parts of a film are being shot. Within minutes after a scene is done the director can see how live-action and special effects blend and roughly how the final scene will look.

All of this is not to slight the D900K as a serious gaming machine. It's just to point out that when you spend lots of bucks to buy a big Bertha notebook you should expect it to be more than a one trick pony, especially given you can get a very nice standalone gaming console for peanuts compared to the cost of these high end workstations.