For a 17-inch machine, it is fairly light and has a reasonable starting price

Jun 19, 2012 09:19 GMT  ·  By

If one were to drop by iBuyPower's website, they might spot a certain notebook that hasn’t been up for sale before, dubbed Valkyrie CZ-17 and, as its name implies, measuring 17 inches in diagonal.

The specifications of the gaming machine are not unusual, but the package they lie within is. And by that we mean that the weight of 6.85 lbs (3 kilos) is quite low for its kind.

Anyway, the laptop uses an Intel Core i7 central processing unit, with four cores, as well as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670M graphics card (1.5 GB GDDR5 VRAM).

Users should remember that the 670M, or at least this one, is a rebranded GTX 570M with higher clocks than usual. This is probably part of the reason why the starting price of the machine isn't humungous.

At any rate, iBuyPower supposedly promised a GTX 675M and even allowed for hopes that GTX 680M would eventually become available for selection.

Whether or not a comparable discrete GPU from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) also makes the list remains to be seen.

That said, regardless of what CPU and graphics components are chosen, buyers will be allowed to equip their notebook with up to 32 GB DDR3 RAM (random access memory). That limit is made possible by four SO-DIMM slots.

As for the rest, the company went with what it already knew would work, from the Full HD display to the backlit keyboard and even Killer LAN E2200 Gigabit Wired Ethernet connection (no Killer Wireless-n module though).

The starting price is of $1,299, or 1,030 Euro. It is a fairly low sum really, possibly owed to the fact that iBuyPower built the item itself, instead of taking an already available machine and rebranding it.

Like other individual boutique vendors, iBuyPower normally sells products made by Compal or Clevo. The Valkyrie CZ-17 is the rare exception.