Eurocom D900F Panther

Maybe money can't buy you love, but it sure can get you some speed. Decked out with a Core i7 Extreme processor, a solid-state drive, and a generous helping of DDR3 RAM, the Eurocom D900F Panther put up some of the highest benchmark-test scores we’ve seen from a laptop for media-crunching tasks, and its overall system and 3D-graphics scores were also very impressive. Although this 17-inch desktop-replacement beast is touted as a mobile workstation, the inclusion of a Blu-ray drive and a crisp high-def display make it one heck of an entertainment system, too. The catch, as it so often is: money. Although the base-model price for the D900F is around $2,000, the unit we tested will set you back a cool $4,250. Plus, this is one enormous laptop that puts out a fair amount of heat. It's a stellar machine, to be sure, but it will appeal mainly to those folks living where big budgets and big speed needs intersect.

The D900F Panther is housed in a stylish yet understated chassis sporting a two-tone gray finish. (It looks like brushed metal but is actually made of plastic.) A gray Eurocom badge with polished chrome lettering and trim adorns the lid. Measuring 2.4x15.6x11.7 inches (HWD) and weighing 11.9 pounds, the D900F Panther is clearly not meant for frequent travel, and if you do decide to take this behemoth out on the road, you’ll have to tote along its massive power brick, too. It measures 7.8x3.2x1.8 inches and adds 2.8 more pounds to your load. Cue up a rolling suitcase.

The 17.1-inch display is framed by a gloss-black bezel with a 3-megapixel Webcam embedded in the upper portion and three status indicators embedded in the lower. The screen has a maximum resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels and is, in a word, stunning. Color quality is excellent, and image detail is sharp, making it ideal for watching movies with the included Blu-ray-reader/DVD-burner combo drive. While watching scenes from several Blu-ray test movies, including Avatar, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and the BBC’s Planet Earth, we were treated to crisp high-definition imagery with fluid playback.

Unfortunately, the audio quality couldn’t quite match the video quality. Speaker output was loud but too trebly; we expected a bit more bass response. Also, while the quality of the Webcam image is a step up from that of the 1.3-megapixel cameras used on most notebooks, it's still too grainy for photos or video that you'd really like to keep. It's certainly acceptable for Skype video chats and Facebook-bound pictures, however.

The spacious keyboard deck uses the same two-tone finish as the exterior and contains a full-size keyboard with a dedicated numeric keypad. The keyboard has a bit of flex to it, but it's still fairly comfortable and not at all mushy. To the left of the keyboard are two programmable game buttons that you can assign for specific weapons or use as macro keys for any application. The array is missing dedicated media-playback and volume controls, but we appreciate the three programmable hotkeys at the top of the keyboard deck that are set up to launch Internet Explorer, an e-mail client, and Windows Media Player. The pointing-device arrangement will do the job, too: The slightly recessed touch pad provides smooth cursor movement, and the mouse buttons are large and responsive, delivering a tactile, audible click when pressed.

The D900F Panther is loaded with ports, most of which are crammed onto the left side of the chassis. Here you’ll find HDMI, eSATA, FireWire, Ethernet, and modem ports, as well as an ExpressCard/54 slot, a seven-format card reader, and the Blu-ray/DVD drive. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to find a a coaxial TV connector for use with an optional mini-PCi Express TV tuner card. This card, not included in our test unit, costs an additional $129 and can turn this notebook into a true all-in-one entertainment device.

All four USB ports are positioned on the right side of the notebook, and a DVI video connector is around back, next to the power jack. Despite the four relatively quiet cooling fans embedded in the bottom of the chassis, the D900F puts out plenty of heat, making it difficult to actually use this laptop on a lap for more than a few minutes at a time. In fact, it’s a good idea to leave this machine on a desk or table to avoid impeding the air flow needed to keep interior components from overheating.

The D900F is the first notebook we’ve tested that uses Intel’s Core i7-980X Extreme CPU, which runs at 3.33GHz and features six cores. Paired with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, it topped the charts on every multimedia test we threw at it. On our 64-bit Cinebench 10 test, which taxes all the available cores of a CPU, its score of 25,961 was 10,000 points higher than our previous leader, which happens to be last year’s version of the D900F Panther. It needed just 2 minutes and 33 seconds to encode 11 test MP3 files to AAC format and 1:48 to render our standard sample video file in Windows Media Encoder, both of which are record-setting times for a laptop. Plus, its scores of 9,380 (64-bit) and 9,250 (32-bit) on the two versions of our PCMark Vantage test, which measures overall system performance, were around 4,000 points higher than the average for desktop-replacement notebooks. They weren't weren't quite league-leading; that distinction belongs to the Malibal Satori Seriesnotebook, which benefited from 8GB of memory and dual solid-state drives set up in a RAID configuration.

Fueled by an Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M graphics card with 2GB of RAM, the D900F Panther delivered outstanding DirectX 9 (DX9) gaming performance. On our 3DMark06 synthetic DX9 gaming test, the Panther's scores of 14,780, at its native resolution of 1,920x1,200 and 20,135 at 1,024x768, were the highest we've seen to date in a laptop, just edging out the Asus W90Vp-X1. (The Asus scored 12,903 at native resolution and 13,297 at 1,024x768.) The Panther's score of 10,118 on our other synthetic 3D benchmark test, 3DMark Vantage, was way above average but not quite as high as a version of the Alienware M17x we tested; that model had dual graphics processors going for it.

The D900F Panther scored a speedy 129 frames per second (fps) on our Company of Heroes DX9 real-world gaming test and 53.8fps on the DirectX 10 (DX10) version of the same test, both of which are higher than average and indicate very smooth gameplay. The Alienware M17x holds the record for the fastest DX10 performance to date on this test, at 61.7fps, however.

This notebook is a lightweight in a more crucial area, though: warranty. Eurocom covers the D900F with a standard one-year warranty that includes a year of technical support and mail-in repair service. While one-year warranty plans are common in the laptop world, a system at such a hefty price should include a three-year plan, like with Dell’s top-of-the-line Studio XPS 16 notebooks. (Those machines are also backed by in-home service.) You can purchase two- and three-year extensions to the coverage from Eurocom for an additional $165 and $295, respectively, but neither plan factors in onsite repair service.

If money is a secondary concern and media-crunching performance is the top priority, the Eurocom D900F Panther should be on your short list. While a formidable gaming rig, this big boy really shines when it comes to tasks that require multi-core processing power, including content creation and video/audio encoding. In fact, it’ll handle everything that a well-equipped desktop will handle, and it’s (somewhat) portable. Just don’t stray too far from a power outlet.