Maingear's six-core laptop has 1.8TB of SSD storage

PC maker Maingear is chasing the laptop performance crown with its latest Titan 17 laptop, which can be configured to include Intel's fastest desktop processor and up to 1.8TB of solid-state drive storage.

The Titan 17 could be configured to include Intel's Core i7 3960X processor, a six-core chip otherwise targeted at gaming desktops. The laptop has three slots that can accommodate 1.8TB of storage through three 600GB SSDs, or up to 2.25GB of storage through three 750GB hard drives.

The laptop has a 17.3-inch screen, supports up to 32GB of memory and has slots for the latest mobile graphics cards from Nvidia. The laptop weighs around 12.13 pounds (5.5 kilograms) with a battery, and measures 16.5 inches by 2.2 inches by 11.3 inches (41.9 centimeters by 5.6 centimeters by 28.7 centimeters).

The laptop's price starts at US$3,499, and it is available for preorder on the company's website. A fully configured system with the Core i7-3960X chip, 32GB of RAM, 1.8TB of SSD storage, Windows 7 Home Premium and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580M graphics cards with 2GB of graphics memory is $8,264.

The Titan 17 will start shipping in early March, a company spokeswoman said.

Maingear's goal with Titan 17 is to capture the laptop performance crown and get a step ahead of rivals, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

"If you look at LAN parties, there are some people carrying these big laptops," McCarron said.

With the high-powered processor and graphics cards, users should not expect much battery life, McCarron said. Laptops like the Titan 17 are bulky and need elaborate cooling systems that can sap battery life, McCarron said.

The system has four fans, including one for the system CPU and three for GPUs, Maingear's spokeswoman said.

The trend of building high-performance laptops with desktop components has subsided in recent years as smaller laptops improve on application and graphics performance, McCarron said. But Titan 17 may appeal to specialist users who need the performance of a gaming desktop or workstation in a laptop, he said.

The Titan 17 has a webcam and two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, an HDMI 1.4a, a FireWire and eSATA ports.

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