Attention all gaming laptop wannabes: It’s time to meet your maker. The Maingear Titan 17’s formidable girth and sheer performance are enough to make smaller PCs cower in its lengthy shadow. Though quite pricey, starting at $2,799 for a base model and hefty at a staggering 2.4×16.5×11.3 inches and 16.7 pounds, this sophisticated piece of machinery is best left at home, lest you plan to develop a chronic back problem in your later years.

Encased in an all-black brushed aluminum Clevo X7200 chassis with silver trim, the handsome Titan 17 comes with a plain black carrying case and has plentiful ports. The downside to having top-of-the-line Nvidia graphics chips and a Core i7 Extreme Edition desktop-grade processor is that the three fans necessary to cool it down do become quite loud, which really can’t be helped. It’s safe to say that with the top-notch hardware, the Titan 17 aced all our lab tests with flying colors and even set the bar for quite a few as well.

Here are some highlights of our review of the Maingear Titan 17:

“A true desktop replacement, everything about this 17-inch behemoth is big, from its 13-plus–pound chassis to its massive price in our test configuration. As you’d expect for the price, it comes up huge in terms of performance, making mincemeat of nearly every benchmark test we threw at it and setting new graphics-performance records for a laptop. Not surprisingly, the Titan 17 is very heavy, too, although we doubt anybody will be toting it around town much. It also runs loud at times, but the fans are necessary to prevent its powerful CPU and graphics hardware from overheating.”

“At nearly $5,800, the Maingear Titan 17 has the distinction of being the priciest notebook to hit our labs in recent years. For this kind of money, you’d expect superior performance, and the Titan 17 delivers, setting new speed records on our gaming and multimedia benchmark tests. The one false note it sounded, however, is its six-core processor, which can only be truly taxed under certain limited circumstances (primarily, media-file crunching) and is mostly overkill for gaming. That processor adds plenty to the price without a full benefit for the most likely users (gamers). Likewise, serious media editors who could use the six cores to their full potential will likely find the dual SLI graphics overkill.”

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