Falcon Northwest FragBook DR 6800

If the first-class features don’t knock you off your chair, then the price will. Falcon Northwest’s FragBook DR 6800 is a gaming and multimedia monster that’s as powerful as it is expensive, complete with an automotive-class finish to the case. Stuffed with a desktop processor, the most powerful graphics solution available, and topped off with a gorgeous 17-inch Wide-UXGA display, the good news is that this desktop replacement notebook delivers on its promise of ultimate performance and style.

Available in any color in the spectrum, Falcon Northwest boasts that each individual FragBook is custom painted with “any color automotive paint currently made” in a ten-layer process that produces a high-gloss, shiny finish befitting a notebook full of premium parts. Falcon Northwest will even add a specialized logo or image of your choosing for an unspecified price. A high performance system deserves a four-star exterior, and Falcon Northwest doesn’t disappoint.

Paint job aside, the FragBook is no beauty queen. The overall shape is one of a giant box, which is not helped by the back-breaking 13-pound weight. The main culprit for its size is the stock Taiwanese motherboard that savvy notebook customers will recognize as the identical design used in notebooks sold by other gaming notebook vendors like Alienware, VoodooPC, and Hypersonic. Like its competitors, the DR 6800 is light enough to lug from room to room or to take to the occasional LAN party. To help you travel in style, and to intimidate would-be opponents, Falcon Northwest throws in an all-aluminum briefcase.

The major appeal of the FragBook is its astonishing processing power, which puts the DR 6800 near the top of its class. The 3.6-GHz Intel Pentium 4 is a processor designed for desktops, and it’s one of Intel’s fastest. The main hardware update on this version of the FragBook is the addition of Nvidia’s GeForce Go 7800 GTX graphics card. The 110-nanometer version of Nvidia’s most powerful processor, the 7800 has a 24-pixel pipeline, support for Direct X 9 Shader Model 3.0, and around 300 million transistors, making it the premiere graphics solution available (competitor ATI has announced a 90-nm card called the Radeon X1800, but mobile versions are months away). When paired with the P4, its benchmark scores of 14,586 in 3DMark03 is extraordinary, and only a hair shy of our current record of 14,749 held by the Dell XPS M170. That’s a lot of horsepower under the hood.

The FragBook’s gaming might was in full effect when we fired up Far Cry. This notebook averaged 126.5 frames per second, an excellent score that’s in the range of a high-end desktop and more than 20 points higher than the Dell XPS M170. Gameplay on Call of Duty 2 produced rich polygon detail and smooth transitions, and the action looked amazing on the 17-inch Wide-UXGA display. It has a staggering maximum resolution of 1900 x 1200 pixels, which is also fantastic for DVD playback.

Individual features on the FragBook can be upscaled or downscaled according to your budget. Ours came pre-configured with two optical drives and two hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The RAID 0 “striping” technique uses both hard drives at the same time, writing half the data to each, to max out read and write performance. The two optical drives can burn dual-layer discs, which hold up to 8.5GB of data, nearly twice that of regular DVD discs. The presence of two drives makes copying DVDs simple, and the built-in TV tuner from AVerMedia transforms the FragBook into a television. However, keep in mind that Windows XP Media Center Edition is not available as a configurable option; you’re limited to either Home or Professional for maintaining your media collections.

The DR 6800 boasts an impressive array of ports, including four USB 2.0, FireWire, DVI, and a 7-in-1 memory card reader. Our version included not only 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, but also Bluetooth for interfacing with cell phones and other wireless devices.

Customer support is the industry-standard one-year parts and labor, but Falcon Northwest offers a free no dead-pixel guarantee that will replace your display if it comes with a defect from the factory. During the first year of warranty, the company promises a unique “overnight service” where the system will be picked up and shipped overnight to a factory for repair at no cost. That’s assuming the normal channels of support Falcon Northwest offers (phone, e-mail, and fax) can’t fix the problem.

 Falcon Northwest claims the price is dropping and will continue to drop, but for now the DR 6800 costs nearly a grand more than the slimmer and just-as-powerful Dell XPS M170. Those who crave an extreme gaming notebook that doesn’t look like anything else in the world will likely shrug off the sticker shock. This rig was designed to make the Joneses jealous, and it does that with the unapologetic glee of a touchdown dance.