Billing the Phantom as a mobile workstation or mobile server, Eurocom says it’s the first notebook using Intel i7 Quad Core and Xeon processors and offering 1.5 TB of storage on up to three SATA hard drives.
The quads are available in 3.2GHz and 2.93GHz flavours. There’s 8MB of Level 3 cache, Gigabit Ethernet on board, and ports for HDMI, eSATA and DVI. The notebooks feature a 17-inch WUXGA LCD display and a full-size keyboard. And tucked inside is a whopping 16GB of DDR3-1366 RAM and an uninterruptible power supply.
You can’t cram those specs into a notebook chassis without taking a hit on the portability side, but Eurocom does reasonably well, considering. The 15.8-by-11.9-inch laptop does require a larger lap than a Dell Mini, but it’s still only a hair over two inches thick.
It weighs in at 12 pounds, which is hefty for a notebook these days, but consider this: Five years ago, that would have been about normal. And also consider that Eurocom advertizes its battery life as one hour.
This machine may be portable in the sense that it can be moved from place to place, but it’s not meant, ironically enough, to replace a laptop.
What it is meant for, according to the company, is “IT professionals and software developers demanding all-in-one server capabilities (with) maximum performance and power when running and/or testing professional applications such as databases, CRM, etc.”
Press materials didn’t include the price, which made us suspect it might be stratospheric, but according to the company Web site, the Phantom starts at a near-reasonable $2,999. But doubling the standard memory to 8GB adds $800 to the price, and second and third hard drives add about $500 between them.