Maingear this week announced a 3D gaming laptop with an overclocked 4.8GHz processor, in a bid to gain the extreme laptop performance crown from rivals.
The overclocked processor in the EX-L 17 3D laptop is Intel’s latest quad-core Core i7-2920XM Extreme Edition processor. It ordinarily runs at 2.5GHz, but can clock up to 3.5GHz under certain conditions, for example, when another core is idle.
The chip, which is based on Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, has 8MB of cache and draws up to 55 watts of power.
The laptop has a 17.3-inch screen, and includes Nvidia’s GeForce GTX485M graphics card for 3D gaming. The graphics card is compatible with Microsoft’s DirectX 11 graphics technology, which could bring a more realistic gaming experience to Windows 7 laptops.
Gamers usually push the performance of PCs, and Intel’s Extreme Edition processors can be overclocked to run at higher clock speeds. PC makers usually overclock laptops and load them with the best available hardware to gain the laptop performance crown from rivals.
Maingear’s laptop is a desktop replacement and weighs 8.6 pounds (3.9 kilograms) with an eight-cell battery. The company could not immediately provide information on the laptop’s battery life, but demanding laptops usually offer little run time on a single charge.
Nvidia’s glasses can be used to view 3D images on the laptop’s LED (light-emitting diode) backlit display. The laptop supports up to 16GB of memory and has two bays for up to 960GB of solid-state drive storage. There are HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) and DVI (digital-visual interface) ports to connect multiple external monitors to the laptop.
A “well-equipped laptop” is priced starting at US$2,659, Maingear said in a statement. The laptop can be customized and ordered through the company’s website. A fully loaded configuration with the Core i7-2920XM processor, 16GB of RAM, 960GB of SSD storage, Nvidia graphics card and Windows 7 Ultimate is priced at US$8,282.