Chicago (IL) – If you were to try to squeeze your server into a notebook form factor, how would it look like? You can check Eurocom’s new Phantom D90xC Phantom-X portable computer to find – it comes with a quad-core Xeon processor, two graphics cards and, if you can wait a few more months, up to 3 TB of hard drive storage or 384 GB of SSD storage. Just don’t ask about the battery running time.

There is a market for many products you first think don’t make much sense and this latest Eurocom portable computer may be one of them. Calling this Phantom model “portable” may even be a bit of a stretch, as it weighs in at around 12 pounds (or the equivalent of four Macbook Air notebooks), but if you compare its capability to act as a server, then Eurocom’s achievement to fit all relevant server components into a notebook form factor, then you certainly see a remarkable product reveal itself.

Equipped with a 95-watt quad-core Xeon X3360 processor (45 nm, 12 MB L2 cache) running at 2.83 GHz, the 17” D90xC is priced from about $3350. If you were to check all the options, which include a 1920x1200 pixel display, a 2x Blu-ray drive, two GeForce 8800M GTX graphics chips, three 64 GB solid state disk drives, as well as Windows Server 2008, you end up with a very capable notebook that will cost just under $10,000 (choose 500 GB hard drives instead and the bill will be about $7200). Eurocom said that the notebook has the physical space to integrate up to six hard drives for up to 3 TB of storage space (960 GB of hybrid hard drives or 384 GB with SSDs), which will be available in the September time frame.  

The D90xC is not meant to be carried around like a notebook, so don’t expect typical advantages you see from modern notebooks, such as increasing battery times that are now in the 5 hour range with some models. Considering the fact that there are very power hungry components in this notebook, a battery time of about one hour actually deserves praise. This author remembers his first precious multimedia notebook, a 1996 Gateway 12” model equipped with a Pentium MMX-166 MHz CPU that barely hit 90 minutes. 1 hour may not sound like much today, but consider a server (including display) that can run for 1 hour on a battery alone could be a very special and valuable product for some people out there.