Editor’s Pick of the Week, 11 in a Series

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

The first thing you need to understand about Eurocom’s new D901C Notebook PC is that it’s a high-performance engineering-class workstation in a notebook form factor. The D901C is not some dainty thing to impress your hipsterness upon your mimosa-sipping compadres in first class whenever you whip it out to battle FreeCell. They will,  nonetheless, be impressed: The D901C is a 12-pound, graphics, storage, and processing workhorse that is designed to replace a desktop unit and give you the option to take desktop power with you.

Let’s start with graphics. You can get the D901C with either the NVIDIA GeForce Go 8800GTX, 8700GT, or 7950 GTX graphics cards with 512MB of DDR3 memory or the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1600M with 512MB of DDR3 graphics memory. The FX1600M provides SLI (Scalable Link Interface) video technology, which means that you can get excellent image quality out of the D901C’s 17-inch widescreen WUXGA, 1920 x 1200-pixel LCD display.

The D901C leverages Intel Quad Core or Core Extreme processors. Four cores means that it has both the bandwidth and the power to handle multitasking and multithreaded applications like MCAD, CAM,  animation, 3D simulation, CAE, and math really well. You can get the unit with either Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 running at 2.4GHz or Q6700 processor running at 2.66GHz. L2 cache sizes are either 4MB or 8MB depending upon the processor you choose. Front side bus speeds of 1066MHz or 1333MHz, again are processor dependent. The D901C comes with 2GB of memory, upgradeable to 4GB.

You can configure the D901C with up to 750GB of storage as RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 5. A solid-state storage option is offered, as is a Blu-Ray optical drive. Wireless networking, Bluetooth, CD/DVD drives, and 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems, and even Microsoft Server 2003 or Linux are all available.

Eurocom custom builds its mobile workstations so that you can configure the D901 as you want it. This also makes pricing a bit tough to pin down, especially since the Eurocom website seems to be only partially configured for the D901C. That said, a base unit with the 17-inch display, a 2.40GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor, Q6600, 1066 FSB, 8MB L2 cache, 2GB of RAM, a 120GB SATA-300 hard drive, optical drive, card reader,  power cords, and battery starts at $2,608, according to the price list page on Eurocom’s website. I think that includes a carrying case.

The short of it is that the new D901C is a high-end engineering workstation that happens to be in a mobile workstation form factor. You can get the full details on it from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. There you’ll also find links to the Eurocom website for complete details and imagery.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering  magazine