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Review: SavRow's Katana 3D-9 Portable Workstation

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 12 April 2005, 00:00

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Savrow

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabca

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Specification

Check out the specs of the chassis SavRow use and how they configured it for the review sample, and you start to get an idea.

Clevo D900T Chassis
CPU Up to Pentium 4 570, 3.8GHz, 1MB L2
Northbridge Intel i915P
Memory Support 4 slots. 4 x DDR-II (DDR533 max), 4GB max
Display 17 inch WSXGA or WUXGA, 1680x1050 or 1920x1200, 16:9 wide
PEG 16 lanes from the i915P
Southbridge Intel ICH6
Audio Realtek ALC880 HD Audio CODEC from ICH6 feed
Audio Connectivity Five internal speakers setup as 4.1
SPDIF output, microphone input, headphone input, line output
PCI Conventional 1 x 32-bit miniPCI
IDE 2 ports from ICH6
IDE RAID Both ICH6 ports
SATA 2 ports from Promise 378
SATA RAID Both Promise ports
Networking Realtek 8110 GigE, 10/100/1000 Mibit/sec
56K internal modem
USB ICH6, 4 USB2.0
FireWire 2 x FireWire400, 4-pin unpowered
PC Card 32-bit Type II
Other I/O 7-in-1 card reader, DVI, composite and S-Video
Parallel, serial, PS2, built-in webcam, S-Video input (requires optional TV-tuner, IrDA
Disk space 2 internal 2.5" bays
2 laptop optical external bays
Batteries 1 bay
Weight and dimensions 5.52kg/12.17lb with one HDD, one optical, one battery
397mm/15.6in wide
298mm/11.7in deep
50mm/1.96in thick

Yes, those specs are correct. The D900T based SavRow Katana 3D-9 will take up to two hard disks and two optical drives - all at the same time. And, the 17in wide-screen LCD panel IS accompanied by five built-in speakers (and one of them is a sub-woofer).

Perhaps, now you're starting to understand why it weighs the wrong side of 5kilos and is nearly 2in thick, and realise that the fact that the machine even nods in the direction of portability is remarkable.

Perhaps in its rush to get us the test sample - for what should be the first real-world review of a portable with an NVIDIA Quadro FX Go1400 graphics unit - SavRow's configuration of the machine fell a bit short of what it says is the normal spec.

The review sample had 1GB of Corsair DDR2-533 memory - half the usual quota (the maximum is 4GB), and a single 100GByte Seagate Momentus 5,400rpm hard disk, rather than the 7,200rpm drive that would normally be featured. There was also only one optical drive, an 8x dual-layer DVD+-R/RW burner, and the CPU was a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 - there's an option for 3.8GHz.

Before showing you what the D900T looks like, though, it needs to be mentioned that the NVIDIA Quadro FX Go1400 has 256MB of GDDR3 memory and that the provided WSXGA display option has a 1680x1050 pixel resolution. Oh, and far from trivial, there's also a 2-in-1 miniPC WiFi-cum-Bluetooth expansion card.

Device Manager

Device Manager