14 DAY TRIAL // People may not have heard about Rain Computers, but that might just be because that particular company doesn't bother much with regular consumer laptops, choosing instead to make and sell video and audio workstations for Public Enemy, Cirque du Soleil, the US Olympic Committee, Conan O'Brien and other notable clients.
The newest notebook to leave its labs is a mobile workstation called LiveBook V and based on a solid combination of high-end hardware parts.
And by high-end combination, we mean to say that, by visiting the Rain Custom Shop, prospective buyers will be allowed to choose a quad-core CPU, 8 GB of memory, two storage drives (an SSD and an HDD), and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670MX discrete GPU.
And this is just the starting configuration, which itself costs $2,499 / €1,921–2,499.
If people wish to splurge, they can even go for 32 GB RAM, extra storage via MSATA SSDs, NVIDIA Quadro K3000M and K5000M workstation-class graphics adapters, etc.
All in all, there is definitely nothing that could stop buyers of the LiveBook V from running intensive graphics design and video editing operations.
“You might think that, because of all the power in this beast, we're playing that stupid computer industry game of 'mine is bigger than yours',” said Rain CEO, Kevin Jacoby, of their new mobile monster.
“But what LiveBook V is really about goes way beyond high performance processing. For us, it's about creating the best tool for the job so artists can just concentrate on being creative.”
Needless to say, the 17.3-inch LCD has a native resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (Full HD). Large and good-looking, although anyone who has a bigger monitor or HDTV can hook that up via DisplayPort, DVI or HDMI.
Most graphics designers have at least one of those many 50-inch or larger TVs, or at least a high-end professional monitor where Adobe Premiere Pro, 3ds Max and Maya by Autodesk, as well as Adobe After Effects, look the best, so it is fortuitous that the ports exist.