Quad Core Laptop

Never mind that there's little-to-no software that can take advantage of four processing cores, Xtreme Notebooks has released the first quad-core laptop in the U.S. With no mobile quad-core parts in existence, the Xtreme 917V Accelerator turns to desktop CPUs, giving you a choice between the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the Q6700. Pricing starts at $3,359. Other niceties on this gaming laptop/mobile workstation include: a glossy widescreen 17-inch display (up to 1920x1200 resolution), one or two Nvidia GeForce Go 8700M GT or 7950 GTX graphics cards, and up to three hard drives in RAID 0, 1 or 5 configurations. It ships with 4.1 speakers (yes, this beast has a subwoofer), a Webcam, and a hefty 12-cell battery, while giving you the option to add a Blu-ray drive, a TV tuner, and 11n Wi-Fi. You can outfit it with XP or Vista or opt out of a preloaded OS entirely. Xtreme Notebooks quotes a system weight of 12.5 pounds.

It all adds up to an unquestionably powerful laptop, but I'd like to know what the Xtreme 917V Accelerator sounds like when it's cooling a desktop CPU, two video cards, and three hard drives. I retired an old Dell laptop last year that used a Pentium 4 desktop chip; the thing was not what you'd call quiet.