RawBook 2550! *drooool*

Most of you who at least read the General section already know of my fiance's 17" Powerbook G4's unfortunate and untimely demise (we have some very guilty looking cats wandering around).

Given that he's a web designer and we sell laptops, we needed a new one-FAST! So we put together what is now our current top-of-the-line model, the Rawbook 2550, with specs enough to handle his web design programs and my online MMORPG addiction. The results were this:
17" Widescreen Ultrabright LCD
nVidia GeForce Go 6800 graphics card
Integrated wireless A+B+G
2X80 GB SATA HDD
2GB DDRII RAM
DVD-RW

We took it home on Friday night, after the unfortunate Powerbook incident...and last night I finally managed to part him from it long enough to test it out. I installed World of Warcraft, cranked up the specs as high as they would go, logged on, and waited...

Oh.
My.
God.

Fantastic. Unbelieveable. Puts my little Powerbook to absolute shame. It runs beautifully, with amazing texture detail, smooth speeds, and this is with the normal host of programs running in the background, like Trillian and stuff. I NEED ME ONE OF THESE THINGS!!!

Oh, and did I mention we got it for almost $1000 less than a Dell XPS M170, which is what it essentially is? Best part!

 

New m170 offers the 7800 card, but the 6800 is a nice card. No laptops on ebay.

 

Yeah, we're only doing custom-built machines right now...eBay is too annoying to sell on.

I have yet to get the 7800 card in; as with everything else, the new stuff gets released to the major players first and then comes down to us in trickles. It's why we don't have a 100GB SATA HDD yet and we had to go with 2X80 GB for our own use.

I was prepared to be impressed by this machine, but being a complacent Mac owner I didn't expect that it would be THIS good! It's got a few features the Dell dosen't have, either-like quiet mode (which is nice if you do actually attempt to travel with a 17" laptop) which quiets the cooling fan (you get a slower speed with this option on), and (my personal favourite) you can turn off the tap function on the touchpad with the push of a button up by the screen! This is great because my thumbs have a tendancy to tap the pad and move the cursor all over while I'm typing. I'm currently writing up a more full review of this machine for this site as I get the chance to spend more time on it.

 

Is this the same as this notebook? The specs sound awfully familiar.

http://www.powernotebooks.com/specs/Crown/e6-17.php

It also happens to be the same notebook as the Fujitsu model that was reviewed earlier in September.

 

Yep, same OEM on all three machines.

 

That raid controller must be nice. Two 7200s in there would be very fast although a little warm. It seems light for it's size.

 

For a 17" it's not so bad, weight and thickness wise. We've been a little spoiled by having Powerbooks, though; but it's actually not too much thicker. The cooling system isn't half bad and although it does get warm, it's certainly not worse than the Powerbook was.

 

Have any NotebookForum guys bought notebooks from you yet?

 

Not yet. I'm trying not to push the fact that I sell notebooks on everyone, even though there are occasions where I think I could get the same machine for them for less. Selling stuff isn't why I'm here. I'm not opposed to selling to people on here, and if they want to buy that's fine, but I'm not really advertising.