The world's most extreme laptops

Some laptops will give you a hernia, while others will fit in a coat pocket. Some cost a day's pay--others, half a year's. Here are the outliers of the notebook world.

By Ian Paul

prev next

The Fastest

Name: Eurocom D901C Phantom-X

Price: $5950

Availability: Now

Extreme spec: 133 score in WorldBench 6

Reasons to love it: The Eurocom D901C Phantom-X is the Frankenstein's monster of the laptop world. Looking at the specs, you can almost imagine Eurocom's engineers scurrying around in a darkened, secluded laboratory somewhere, plunging a processor fit for a high-end desktop into the heart of this clamshell chassis, and then screaming, "It's alive! It's alive!" as the machine starts up for the first time, and the lights in the neighborhood dim.

This beast may not turn against its master or declare war on humanity, but it will scare even the most experienced laptop user with its $5950 price tag ($3000 for the not-so-frightening base model). Under the hood it has 8GB of RAM, two 80GB solid-state drives with Windows Vista, one 320GB traditional hard drive running at 7200 rpm for file storage, an nVidia GeForce Go 9800M GTX graphics processor, and a 3GHz Xeon Quad Core X3370 processor running the show. The Eurocom is currently the WorldBench 6 speed champion in the laptop division, with a score of 133. Translation: It's fast--very, very fast.

If you want a speedy machine that won’t drain your bank account so quickly, consider Dell's Alienware M15X with Intel's new Core i7 processor. The M15x isn’t cheap ($1499 just for the no-frills base model), but it is a little more portable at 9 pounds, and it still delivers an impressive punch.

5 of 14