What if you need a mobile system with more than three screens? Well, Expanscape has developed a prototype of a laptop with as many as seven screens, and it is already selling the prototypes to interested customers. It also comes packed with an impressive amount of power on the compute side to match.
The Aurora 7 Prototype indeed comes with four 17.3-inch monitors featuring a 4K resolution (two working in landscape, two in portrait mode) as well as three auxiliary 7-inch screens featuring a 1920 x 1200 resolution. All the monitors fold or swivel out of the primary chassis, making it a transformer of sorts, and no on-site assembly before deployment is necessary. The whole system weighs around 12 kilograms, so it is not easy to carry, but it is naturally easier to transport than a laptop along with six extra displays.
With more of us working from home due to the pandemic, multi-display setups are becoming the norm and are widely used for a variety of applications. Setting a multi-monitor configuration at home or in an office is easy, and while attaching two more displays to a laptop is also possible, it gets slightly more complicated.
Expanscape's Aurora 7 Prototype laptop computer is built for very particular applications and audiences in mind (such as security operations centers, data scientists, content creators) that traditionally use multi-display PCs, but who at times need to transport and deploy them quickly. The creators wanted their seven-screen laptop computer to be portable, structurally rigid, and capable of running demanding programs.
As far as internal hardware is concerned, the Aurora 7 is powered by Intel's Core i9-9900K processor that is accompanied by 64GB of DDR4-2666 memory, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card, two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 SSDs, one 2.5-inch MLC SSD, and a 2TB 7200RPM hard drive. The PC has all modern connectivity technologies, including Bluetooth, GbE, Wi-Fi, and USB. Since the Aurora 7 uses a fairly spacious chassis, the developer says that it can use different platforms, including AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X or Intel's Core i9-10900K.
Among the impressive peculiarities of the Expanscape's Aurora 7 Prototype are two internal batteries. The primary internal battery features an 82Wh capacity and powers the system itself. The secondary internal battery has a 148Wh capacity and is used to power the screens. The battery life for the whole system is about 2 hours 20 minutes, but at high clocks under high loads, it will get lower.
Technically, all of Expanscape's seven-screen Aurora 7 machines are just prototypes that do not look or feel like commercial products, yet the company can build them to order and sell to interested parties who agree so sign a contract and pay a hefty sum of money.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
Can I get one for under 5 figures ? I understand custom bespoke product but give us a ballpark estimate at least.
For under $10,000 it might be worth having one of these as a status symbol in Silicon Valley or other nerd paradise. Much more practical than a Tesla that will be hidden in a parking garage most of the time.
