Editor’s Pick: Eurocom Ships Neptune 4W Mobile Workstation

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Mobile computers are great things. But many of them are not up to engineering work for a variety of reasons, most of which can be summed up by saying that mobile computers tend to be optimized for business applications. That is, for engineering work they have dinky screens, blah graphics, underpowered processors, not enough RAM and middling storage capacities. Eurocom Corp., however, recently announced its Neptune 4W mobile workstation. It does not seem to fall into your typical mobile computer category at all. In fact, it seems that this unit could serve as your desktop engineering workstation replacement and, of course, it’s made to go with you wherever you need to travel. Let’s take a peek at what the Neptune 4W offers.

The Neptune 4W starts with a 17.3-in display that offers you 1920 x 1080 resolution, so you can see a rendered design, model or video clearly and without scrolling or zooming excessively. At home or the office, you can plug larger, free-standing screens into its DisplayPort and HDMI connections. Check that dinky display problem off the list.

Graphics: The Neptune 4W offers VGA graphics upgradeability through its Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM) 3.0b interconnect standard for GPUs (graphics processing units). The thing about MXM is that this standard is designed to enable easy GPU card upgradeability. Eurocom offers Neptune 4W users a selection of professional-grade NVIDIA Quadro graphics accelerators – the K5100M, K3100M, K2100M or K1100M to be specific. Definitely no blah graphics here.

To run your engineering applications with those NVIDIA GPU-accelerated graphics cards, the Neptune 4W is built around fourth-generation Intel mobile Core i7-4xxx series CPUs and will support that processor line all the way up to the Intel Core i7- 4940MX Processor Extreme. The latter is a 4-core processor that has a 64-bit instruction set, 8MB cache and clock speeds up to 4.00 GHz. The Neptune 4W mobile workstation also supports up to 32GB memory, which is about four times more than your typical business-class mobile computer. So you have plenty of memory and the processor to exploit your applications and run your animations or renderings.

While many business-class mobile computers support OK storage capacities like 180GB or something, the Neptune 4W mobile workstation can handle up to 6.5TB of RAID storage through three standard storage drive bays and two mSATA (mini Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) solid state drives (SSDs). Suffice it to say, 6.5TB of mass storage should hold you for a while.

Other interesting details about the Neptune 4W: It has three security layers, including the Kensington Lock Slot and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). You can run 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Ubuntu Linux as your operating system. And it comes with an illuminated backlit keyboard with user-customizable colors, so you’ll look cool with it.

Like pretty much everything that Eurocom offers, the Neptune 4W starts with a customizable albeit solid base unit, which, incidentally, here is a hair less than 1800 bucks. From that foundation you can spec out exactly what you really need such as mid-range graphics or a processor better suited for numbering crunching.

To get started on that investigation, hit the link at the end of today’s Pick of the Week write-up to go to the Neptune 4W landing page. Then hit the components tab to check out all your options. Good stuff.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

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