Live Fast with the Falcon FragBook DRX

If you must have the most powerful gaming laptop, Falcon's FragBook DRX boasts it has two of everything you need - and a whopping hour of battery life.

We’re sure readers are familiar with the image of a balding man getting past middle age, driving around town in an very expensive, very red sports car—usually a convertible—and the thing for which that car is compensating.

So, for folks who know a gamer who just, um, can’t compete without the latest, greatest, fastest, and flashiest system available, we bring news of the FragBook DRX from Falcon Northwest. The DRX—stands for Desktop Replacement Extreme, get it?—pushes the limits of what might be considered a laptop system—or even a desktop system!—while delivering the storage, processing, and graphics oomph to make anyone feel like a youngster again.

The FragBook DRX offers Intel Core 2 Duo processors running at up to 2.93 GHz, support for up to 4 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 RAM, and 17-inch 1,900 by 1,200 pixel LCD display. But that’s just the start of the massively overloaded DRX: for video power, the system sports wo Nvidia GeForce 7950 GTX Go grphics controllers (which, for XP users, features SLI), each with 512 MB of DDR3 video RAM. The DRX supports up to three internal SATA II hard drives with RAID 0, 1, and 5 capability, so you can either have (hopefully) enough storage for your entire media collection or über-reliable data backup—or, for some people, maybe both. The system also sports a 1.3 megapixel Webcam, 802.11n Wi-Fi wireless networking, an 8× dual-layer DVD burner, gigabit Ethernet, and four internal speakers. Also on board: DVI, VGA, and S-Video output; four USB 2.0 ports; 1 mini FireWire port; headphone, mic, audio in, and S/PDIF; an ExpressCard/34/54 slot, a 7-in-1 media card reader, and a CATV television tuner.

If you think all this hardware consumes power, you’d be right: the DRX’s twelve-cell lithium-ion batery promises only 1 hour of use. And if you think all this hardware would be heavy, you’d be right, although the unit’s 12.1 pounds isn’t as bad as some other desktop replacement rigs.

The FragBook DRX is completely customizable, from chassis to drive capacities to peripherals to operating system to custom paint jobs, with a base price of $5,433.79; of course, with 4 GB of RAM and three hard drives (on 7200 rpm 100 GB, two 5400 RPM 160 GB) the price tag jumps to $7,763.56.

And we’re sure buyers won’t be compensating for anything missing in their lives.