5. Eurocom's Inner Beauty

Eurocom’s M570RU Divine-X uses a rather ordinary-appearing 4.4 amp-hour battery, but this unit doesn’t have nearly the power stress of the Alienware model to which we are comparing it.

A single graphics processor and CPU reduce cooling complexity, but Eurocom still uses large fans.

The M570RU Divine-X may not employ SLI, but it’s still a semi-portable gaming rig, so it needs graphics power. A single NVidia GeForce 7950GTX is used here, equipped with 512 megabytes of GDDR3 graphics memory.

A 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 provides lots of power, but a little less speed than the 2.33 gigahertz T7600 of Alienware’s m9750. But while Alienware’s T7600 uses FSB667, Eurocom’s T7500 has Intel’s faster FSB800 via a newer PM965 chipset.

Since our M570RU configuration included 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate, Eurocom threw in a full 4 GB of DDR2-800 RAM.

Also unpaired is the hard drive, as Eurocom provides a single Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160 gigabyte 7200 RPM hard drive.

Eurocom’s M570RU Divine-X uses the same Intel 802.11 A/G/N (that is, Draft-N) wireless controller as Alienware, but design differences made it a little easier to photograph.

Finally, the DVD burner. Eurocom sources its optical drive from the Toshiba/Samsung collaboration now called Toshiba Samsung Storage Technologies (TSST).

A Blu-ray disk player might have been a better choice considering that the M57RU Divine-X native panel resolution of 1920x1200 is perfect for displaying 1080p video, but Eurocom doesn’t even offer it as an option. Then again, most users probably won’t pay the $600 upgrade price Alienware wants for its Blu-ray player anyway.