Thursday, January 8, 2009

3 Laptops On An Unlimited Budget


Ever since I have joined Tech2 as a technical reviewer, I have had the rare pleasure of reviewing all kinds of laptops ranging from your standard 14.1 inch workhorses to exotic HD-Ready multimedia powerhouses. In many ways it has been like a dream come true, keeping in mind that I have been a tech-head all my life and a laptop fan ever since I laid my eyes on them a few short years ago.

This week instead of picking out 3 laptops from any particular category, I have decided to go in a different direction. The list below represents my wish list of laptops I would love to own. These laptops I think represent the biggest best and fastest machines that are available today. These do not conform particularly to any one category nor are they your standard machines that are available over the counter. These are specialized products and I have chosen them with no budget in mind.

Dell XPS M2010
There are very few words that come to mind to describe this laptop. In fact looking at its
LCD size, weight and height I wonder why it is even categorized as a laptop. Designed to be a multi-media power house, the 2010 features a rather large 20-inch LCD panel with a native resolution of 1680x1050. For its core components Dell has equipped this machine with Intel’s most powerful C2D processor the T7600 (2.33 GHz), 2 GB system memory, a mind-boggling 240GB of storage, a Teac based DVD writer with support for all known current generation CD-R formats, 4 USB Slots, a 5-in-1 card slot, DVI and S-Video outputs.

In other innovations, Dell has equipped this powerful laptop with a series of 8 small speakers which are enclosed around the LCD panel and a 2 inch sub-woofer. When you combine this entire setup you get some fantastic and powerful audio playback capabilities. Graphics-wise the laptop does suffer, as it utilizes an ATI based Radon X1800 series GPU, which while not as powerful as Nvidia’s offerings can still run games at highly playable levels. Finally another notable innovation is the inclusion of a Bluetooth wireless keyboard, which allows a user to work in wireless comfort.

There are very few laptops that scale gaming, multimedia and workhorse power as effortlessly as the XPS M2010. Prices for this crazy machine start at US$ 4,500, for a standard base level affair.

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