Pioneer DreamBook D90

Pioneer offers a giant of a laptop system, for only the giantest of laps.

It’s important to get something out of the way from the get go, the Pioneer is excessive. There is no two ways about it.

Featuring not a mobile processor, but rather a desktop processor forced into a mobile environment, it’s a freakin’ 2.66GHz quad core. Perhaps someone in the engineering department didn’t get the memo as to what a laptop traditionally is.

Leading on from that thought, the D90 can no longer be looked upon as a laptop; for starters your lap aches within minutes of having such a heavy beast resting there, and not to mention the warm fuzzy burning sensation. The unit weighs 10kg! On the flip side, this system is clearly a portable desktop replacement solution.

Keeping with the trend of excessive configurations, the D90 features three 200GB hard disks in a RAID 5 array, contributing a performance boost whilst assuring data redundancy – this is what we call RAID done right.

The battery life, as you could only expect from a ‘laptop’ such as this is, well, non-existent compared with the general laptop concept. Adding to this, the power brick that accompanies this laptop is just that – a brick. So with a leg-cooking, hefty ‘laptop’ we hoped for the sake of this system that it could perform admirably.

Thrown through a myriad of tests, we found the system to be an effective desktop replacement. The only real area of worry was the 3D benchmark results; however we’ve been told that a new revision is on its way that utilises the NVIDIA 8700 series mobile graphics processor.

All testing done and the immobility of the system experienced, we were left wondering as to why we wouldn’t just get a high spec Shuttle system to do the same job.

The concept of portability is both the D90’s strength and weakness, in the end though for the most hardcore LAN gamers we’d suggest a Shuttle system instead.