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Of all four contenders, Eurocom’s Montebello feels the most like a do-it-yourself whitebook. And that’s not too far from the truth, since its shell is intended for resellers looking to build their own mobile offerings. To be fair, so is Killer Notebooks’ Odachi—the main difference, visually, being the graphics shield that Killer Notebooks added. Nevertheless, Clevo’s design keeps the Eurocom offering looking professional thanks to a polished black lid and matching palm rests. This is another two-tone design, the other color being silver around the top and bottom of the chassis.
As with the 17.1” D9C shell, Clevo’s M860TU incorporates a lip underneath the available ports that isn’t quite as attractive as the flush Alienware chassis, but does make for easy lifting. Not that picking up Eurocom’s Montebello is a challenge—it’s the lightest model in our roundup at roughly seven pounds. There’s naturally not as much room with a 15.4” LCD, so you give up the 10-key number pad with Eurocom’s smaller shell. However, the notebook still includes a full-sized keyboard on which it’s a pleasure to type. And the Montebello is one of only two designs we tested that doesn’t latch shut. It instead swivels on a quality hinge with enough resistance to not fall open while closed.
We like how Eurocom jumped into Centrino 2 early, incorporating the PM45 chipset, Intel’s fastest dual-core Core 2 Extreme processor, battery-conserving DDR3 memory, and a relatively potent Nvidia GeForce 9800M GT graphics processor.
Although the M860TU only includes an eight-cell, 4,400 mAh battery, it’s still much more efficient than either of the two SLI-equipped offerings. Of course, the more power-friendly stature comes at the expense of performance, and we’d certainly hesitate before calling this an extreme gaming notebook. Perhaps the Montebello would be more at-home as a desktop replacement workstation rather than a purpose-built entertainment machine.
Like Killer Notebooks’ Odachi, Eurocom’s solution exhausts air out the back of its chassis by pulling it in from underneath. But because the Montebello isn’t hosting a 95 W desktop processor or pair of graphics boards, it gets by with just one fan blowing over a heat pipe and fins. Though the thermal load isn’t nearly as demanding, we’re still not big fans (pardon the pun) of drawing air from under the chassis.
- Forthcoming Notebook Roundup -- Wish List [Mobile Computing]
- Mobility Roundup? [Graphic & Displays]
- Un-finished Santa Rosa laptop lineup [Laptops & Notebooks]
- $1500 Small College Gaming Laptop [Laptops & Notebooks]
- Vista Workshop: More RAM, More Speed [Windows Vista]
Questions? Ask Tom's community!
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From a money point of view, it's never going to make sense buying a gaming laptop. Scaled down performance and inability to upgrade are issues.
But it sure as hell feels good having one ^___^
Hey, that aint green...
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 023-6.html
"shipped the system with a 64-bit copy of Vista Ultimate (Alienware included x32 Home Premium)."
4 Grand? Are you guys nuts? I would say that right there would rule out about 90% of us normal gmaers..
Besides the gaming scores looked weak imo..
I personally thought it was a better idea to go get a Gateway P7811FX with a single Geforce 9800GTS. It plays Call of Duty at 1920x1200 max settings around 50FPS. AND it cost me ONLY $1249 (Plus Best Buy let me pick any game I wanted for FREE!)
what about www.xtremenotebooks.com?
agree with kitsilencer, gaming laptop is never practical.
even with a beast graphics card, you'd be pretty hard to get more than 2 hours of shitty performance.
get a gaming desktop and perhaps an EEE or iPhone for travelling. my iPhone has 20+ games and enough media (don't forget TV connector for watching films in hotels) to keep me busy for more than one week away from my gaming rig.
oops cant spell "gamers" lol
Not true my "Gmaing Laptop" is great at LAN Parties and I play it for 6-8 Hours straight there...
I think maybe you had a bad experience with a laptop that claimed to be a "gaming" laptop. I bought one before like that and it have an 8600M Geforce and it Sucked bad... If you get a good laptop with say a 9800gts or so you would be suprised...
4 Grand? Are you guys nuts? I would say that right there would rule out about 90% of us normal gmaers..
99.90%
PS gaming laptops hold value much better than desktops. I had one I paid 1250 for, had it for a year, then sold it for $1100 and bought the newer "upgraded" model that just came out for $1250. I got an Upgraded CPU (From Core 2 1.67 GHZ to Core 2 Centrino 2 2.26 GHZ), Memory (from 3 Gigs DDR2 667MHZ to 4 Gigs DDR3 1066MHZ), Hard Drive (faster), Video Card (from 8800gts to 9800GTS), Screen (from 1440x800 to 1920x1200) and OS (From 32 bit to 64 bit). Not bad upgrade for $150 or so!
Yeah, I'm a student at a university, and I find my laptop invaluable. Saves tons of space on my desk, and can play any game maxed out - save crysis, where I have to lower the res - with 60fps or more. I payed $2500 for it, too. It gets 2 hours on the battery. I haven't ever run into a situation where I needed it and it was dead.
There are many types of people that I can think of that would be better off with a gaming laptop.
Truck driver's, students, profesionals on the move or frequent travelers.
then there are people who like low electrical bills.
and most of these people can use thier laptop plugged in.
"Although they come from a previous generation of named graphics processors, the GeForce 8800M GTX GPUs used in Killer Notebooks’ Odachi are actually better than the 9800M GTs used in Alienware’s m17x. Again, chalk it up to poor naming on Nvidia’s part.
From an architecture standpoint, the two mobile components are similar. Both center on the G92M GPU manufactured at 65 nm. Both include 96 unified shader processors fed by 512 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit bus. Where the components differ is clock speed. The 8800M GTXs boast 560 MHz clocks, 1,400 MHz shaders, and 900 MHz memory. All three figures are faster than what you’ll get from the 9800M GTs."
These are overclocked, it has nothing to do with poor naming by Nvidia.
Gaming laptops have their niche in the computer world. It's obviously not as big as a gaming desktop, but it's definitely there. This is also a competition of which laptop is the best (in performance, value etc), not if gaming laptops are viable.
Either way, it's always fun to watch Alienware's overpriced creations get thrashed. Go Killer Notebooks
Well, the review does a great job of pimping Alienware & one of the most expensive Clevo resellers (Go KillerNotebooks? They're way overpriced too). You can get equivalent ones cheaper at other resellers, and no, it's not $4k at these places, for the same notebooks.
Try $1800ish for the 15inch Montebello equivalents (same as Eurocom's price or thereabouts), with a much better cooling design than cheaper systems (Gateway 7811x's - which should have also been reviewed in here, as well as a few others). Ah well.
Base price for the D901C at other resellers (Power Notebooks, XoticPc - Sager resellers, ProStar, Lynnbay, Eurocom) is $2090 starting. Sure you can put in overpriced (currently) dual cards and tack on $1200, and put 3 overpriced RAID'd hard drives and pay a lot more, or you can do it yourself, save money and/or put one card in and upgrade later. So yeah, pretty over the top pricing estimates (And I've priced KillerNotebooks, at least for the M860TU 15.4inchers, and they've come out to $700 more - ouch).
Decide what's worth the price. $850 extra for an extreme CPU? No.
Um, isn't the point of all this to build the fastest notebook? Money no object?
Well Done Killer Notebooks!
The Silk Pigs
Its nice to see these charts but I watched prices at bestbuy on the gateways P-6860FX all summer and picked it up when it hit 1150. I wanted something that could play games on the go and I think the 1000-1500 dollar gaming notebook range is about to really open up. As price is really an issue for most of us and while they sacrafice some specs they can play games. Maybe we can get some more reviews on cheaper gaming notebooks hint hint.
Side note: I really wanted something smaller so I'm hoping that the 15.4 inch gaming notebooks become more affordable.
The Gateway P-7811FX is a useless piece of trash. I went through 5 bad units from two different BB stores because they would all lock-up and freeze 5-20 minutes into any game I played.
About the only positive I could say about it was that the CPU, RAM, HDD and optical drive were all user-replaceable. The WUXGA screen had backlight bleeding problems and the GPU gave decent framerates in Crysis at 1920x1200, until the damn thing froze...
I find it difficult to see that there is no viable option between a $1300 Gateway and a $4000 boutique build. $2000 could get you all the parts for a top-performing 17" gaming laptop. Why those wingnuts haven't figured it out yet is beyond me.
Well the 6860-fx is now $809 dollars at select best buys with 1.83ghz dual core and 8800gtx gpu and a 320gb hard drive