14 DAY TRIAL // We doubt “normal” notebooks will disappear because of ultrathins any time soon, but they have, at present, taken a back seat, which means that laptops not meant for normal consumers are more likely to appear than the rest.
As if to confirm this, Eurocom has announced the updated Scorpius Mobile Workstation which, though not new per se, does have a revised hardware design.
The new piece of equipment that customers will be allowed to order when configuring their Scorpius is the NVIDIA Quadro K5000M professional graphics card, with 1344 CUDA cores, 4GB GDDR5 VRAM and a 256-bit memory interface.
This component is “designed and built to provide leading performance, reliability, compatibility and stability” in software suites like Dassault Catia, Dassault Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor 2012, Avid Media Composer, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, 3DS Max, etc.
It doesn't hurt that the 4 GB of memory have ECC support (error-correcting code), enabling detection and correction of common data corruption types.
Basically, the NVIDIA GPU goes a long way in applications like GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D rendering, color correction, compositing, video editing and design visualization.
The rest of the hardware parts aren't shabby either, from the four memory slots (up to 32 GB of DDR3-1600 random access memory / RAM) to the three storage connections (SATA III 6 Gbps) and support for RAID 0/1/5 configurations (up to 1TB HDD/SSD storage for each of the three drives).
Everything is packed inside a durable ABS plastic case with a thickness of under 50 mm (1.9 inches). The total weight is 3.5 kilograms.
All in all, while this may not be the most rugged of mobile workstations, it is one of the most highly performing, and will weather minor unintended hits and shakes, suffered during transportation or work, quite easily.
Finally, thanks to two fans and a sizable cooling array involving copper heatpipes, heat should easily be kept in check too.
