iBuyPower Battalion 101 W870CU Notebook Gets Core i7 Heft

If you're in the market for a stonkingly fast gaming laptop then your options keep getting better; iBuyPower are the latest company to dip a toe into the Core i7 pool, with their new Battalion 101 W870CU notebook.  Inside the hefty chassis there's a 17.3-inch Full HD 1920 x 1080 LCD, up to 8GB of RAM and a choice of Core i7-720QM, i7-820QM or i7-920XM processors.  Graphics are courtesy of NVIDIA's GTX280 with 1GB of DDR3 memory.

Storage kicks off from a mere 250GB, rising to up to dual 500GB HDDs or a choice of dual SSDs, and there's also a choice of DVD or Blu-ray optical drives.  As you'd expect, there's gigabit ethernet, WiFi a/g/n, Bluetooth and an eSATA port, along with a fingerprint scanner and Windows 7 Home Premium.

Pricing kicks off at $2,079, though you're looking at another $200 on top of that for the Core i7-820QM or $745 for the i7-920XM Extreme.  Maxed out with SSDs and Blu-ray and you're looking at something merrily north of $5,000, which seems a lot for a system that will snap your vertebrae should you dare to carry it any significant distance.