Maingear‘s eX-L has long been a staple in the gaming notebook scene. The latest update should keep it there, too, with DirectX 11 support courtesy of a little GPU called the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870. The new Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs are nice as well. We won’t kick them out of bed, but it’s the 5870 GPU that we would wine and dine and take home to momma.
Thankfully Maingear hooked up the eX-L with a sweet dual heatpipe cooling system for both the CPU and GPU to combat the massive levels of heat those two will put off. The rest of the notebook is a bit standard, although still up-market, with a 1080p LCD screen backed by a 30-day, zero pixel warranty and the normal I/O ports of HDMI, DVI, S/PDIF, USB, Firewire, eSata, and a webcam. Yeah, this thing is loaded, but you probably expected that.
Prices start out at $1,599 but that only gets you Core i5 CPU. The real fun starts out at $2,322 when you click the box for the quad-core i7-820QM paired with 8GB of DDR3-1333 RAM. Mmmm tasty.