Editor’s Pick: Mobile Notebook Supports Intel’s i7 Extreme, Xeon Processors

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Eurocom has been building mobile workstations and mobile servers for engineers working with compute-intensive CAD/CAM/CAE, math,  imaging, and similar applications for a number of years now. They really have defined such systems, carving themselves out an excellent niche of engineering power and portability coupled with a knack for incorporating the latest technologies quickly. With that in mind, you should give Eurocom’s D900F Panther-i7 workstation- and server-class notebook a good, long look. It’s on the edge of the leading edge in workstation technology, whether you’re talking portables or desktops.

The D900F Panther-i7 is all about speed, power, and portability—and storage too. The i7 series processors offer speeds up to 3.33GHz and bus speeds of up to 2x 6.4GT/sec, topped with 8MB of L3 cache. The Panther-i7 complements this foundation with as much as 24GB of RAM, NVIDIA graphics acceleration, and, for multitasking and multithreaded performance, 64-bit operating systems like Red Hat, Windows Professional-64, and Windows Server 2008.

Storage?  The Panther-i7 supports up to 2 TB with four physical SATA-300 hard drives,  RAID 0/1/5, and high-capacity optical re-writable Blu Ray storage for data backups. It has a 17-in. LCD display, full-sized keyboard, Gigabit Ethernet port on board, and USB, FireWire, serial, external monitor, and other ports galore. And, since it is a portable, it has about an hour of back-up power.

What the D900F Panther-i7 means is that you can take your office home with you, to a client or worksite, or even to that beach house in Tahiti and run SolidWorks, ANSYS, and the like just as you would normally. For the small engineering outfit, it also means that you can have a full-power server with redundant RAID and a couple of terabytes of storage that you can take with you and set up quickly in, say, emergency or client training sessions offsite.

One last note, Eurocom doesn’t really do off-the-shelf systems in the traditional sense. They certainly offer base units; the D900F Panther-i7 base unit starts at about $3,100 (US). But what Eurocom does is build the unit that you configure for your needs. Hit the configuration link in today’s Pick of the Week write-up for more on the specifications.

If you like the idea of a mobile engineering workstation, with the introduction of Intel’s i7 processors and with what Eurocom packs into its D900F Panther-i7 mobile workstation and mobile server, this is the Pick of the Week for you.

Thanks, pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine

Read today’s Pick of the Week write-up.