Photos: Eurocom's quad-core notebook

The Eurocom D900C Phantom-X is no ordinary notebook. Its dimensions of 39.7cm wide by 29.8cm deep by 5.1-6cm thick, 5.4kg weight and 17-inch screen should tell you that there's more than meets the eye to this system. In fact, it's a workstation-class machine that Eurocom claims is "the world's first quad-core notebook".

The quad-core processors in question are Intel's latest Q6600 (2.4GHz) or Q6700 (2.66GHz), with a 1066MHz frontside bus (FSB) and 8MB of Level 2 cache. The D900C Phantom-X can also be kitted out with Intel's dual-core E6x50 chips, which have a 1333MHz FSB and 4MB of Level 2 cache.

The D900C's size and bulk allows a large number of components and ports to be fitted in around the chassis. Here we can see the VGA-out, S-Video-out, TV-in, RJ-11 (modem), RJ-45 (Ethernet) and FireWire ports, plus a PC Card slot, a seven-in-one flash-card reader and an optical drive (a multi-format DVD writer — a Blu-ray option is due too).

At the back, there's a digital video out (DVI) port. Note also the grilles for the necessarily heavy-duty cooling system.

With the bottom cover removed, the system's quartet of fans, which are needed to cool a powerful quad-core processor, are revealed. Not surprisingly, the battery life of this notebook is a paltry 1.5 hours — even with a 12-cell, 6600mAh battery. Not that you'll want to carry this 5.4kg beast far from a source of mains power.

The D900C offers a number of graphics configurations: the 512MB Nvidia Quadro FX1600M for workstation-class performance, or the Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX or Go 8700GT with 512MB of RAM for gaming. To maximise gaming performance, you can specify a pair of GeForce graphics modules in SLI (Scalable Link Interface) mode.

Hard-disk storage is similarly highly specified. The system accommodates up to three SATA-300 drives, to a maximum of 750GB, in RAID 0, 1 or 5 configuration.

Although we've yet to lay hands on it, the D900C Phantom-X is likely to be a noisy system when all those fans are whirring away. If you need the transportable computing power offered by this notebook, it'll cost you from $2,726 (£1,343).