CompAmerica Orca 9098: the latest "most powerful laptop on Earth"
By Marc Perton 
posted November 11th 2005 2:15PM
posted November 11th 2005 2:15PM
Is CompAmerica's Orca 9098 the "most powerful laptop on Earth,"
as the company claims? While it does have some impressive specs, including a P4 at up to 3.8 MHz, dual hard drives, a
choice of three different high-end graphics adapters, and a 17-inch display, we have to note that we've seen similar
specs from other boutique manufacturers. And for some extreme gamers — a clear target market for this box — that P4 may
be a deal-breaker, given the popularity of AMD processors among that group. Still, at a starting price of about $2,149,
this is priced competitively — though we doubt you can get it in 10 designer colors.
Update: This isn't Engadget 1985, so that should be 3.8 GHz, not MHz.
3.8MHz? That's pretty darn powerful! ;-)
If you think this is pwerful. You should check out the new Black Hawk by PC MicroWorks Corporation!
"Black-Hawk XR5 Quad-Core" from PC MicroWorks Corp. THE fastes, MOST powerfull laptop in the word. Hands down!
"Black-Hawk XR5 Quad-Core" from PC MicroWorks Corp. THE fastes, MOST powerfull laptop in the word. Hands down!
Wow! I wonder what kind of cooling is required to keep a 3.8 MHz CPU cool..
Can you say "f$ck you dell" I got my labtop right here.... lol
Endulge your 30 Seconds of Battery Life, not to mention enough fans to eat your gf's rat for a dog.
-M.
I have a 3.2 courtesy of Sager
http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/product.cfm?ProductType=4791
and it runs very hot... so much so that I got an iLap heat sink for it which has improved things significantly. (great laptop btw)
Personally, I wouldn't put a 3.8 in that form factor.
I've never heard of CompAmerica but all of them buy there laptop stuff from Clevo. Sager has a Laptop just like that.
http://www.pctorque.com/sager-9890-gaming-computers.php
3.8 MHz :o wow! That owns! Cant wait till I get this with the 5 mb hard drives! I heard it will only weigh 65lbs too!
also... my battery life is approx 1 hr... a more adding another HD and a 3.8 processor basically makes it a desktop machine... i.e. always have to have it plugged in.
That is just a Sager? Great machines, but how can this company claim they have the fastest when it is another companies computer? Did they just put some diff innards in it?
Also you can buy that computer here already I believe.
http://powernotebooks.com/specs/Sager/9880specs.php
seems fishy to me, and that another company is trying to take credit for somebody elses work.
what, no 19" LCD? What a POS! Call me when it has a 1650x1080 19" LCD!
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000560056282/
Can someone please explain this to me: every time a laptop includes a numeric keypad, they move the touchpad from the center of the machine towards the left side of the machine. People tend to sit in the middle of the screen, not the middle of the keyboard. The end result is that my left hand almost completely covers the touchpad, causing me to inadvertently touch it, a lot. I end up having to turn the touchpad off in order to type. Is it just me?
I think they're all just resellers of Taiwanese catalogue notebooks.
Sager is one of the better front-ends... and I will wholly recommend my notebook to anyone.
It's NOT A SAGER!!! It's a Clevo. Sager and MANY other companies re-sell clevos. An Athlon FX/X2 version of this machine is coming out very shortly. Now that's a machine to get worked up over.
As this thing weights about 5.1 kg I'd consider this a moveable laptop. Not a portable one.
As this thing weights about 5.1 kg I'd consider this a moveable laptop. Not a portable one.
got one of these babys at begin of this year called cybersystem p17
i found the original manufacturer some weeks ago for newer drivers =)
btw. mine weights 6kg with 2hdd dvd drive and just a 6800go and it runs not just 30secs on battery it runs even a whole hour 80mins to be exactly =)
what about the quantum laptop...wasn't that like 6ghz?
Ah, but does it have a 6-pin bus powered 1394 Firewire port? I see mention that it has a Firewire port but in all likelyhood it is only a non-powered 4-pin type.
From my limited research, there is no PC based (non-Apple) laptop shipping that has an actual full power 6-pin port. I cannot understand why this is so? I want a 6-pin port to use with Audio Firewire interfaces (Presonus, M-audio, etc.). I don't want the hassle of plugging into AC power.
My next laptop will have to include a 6-pin 1394 Firewire port. Currently, that eliminates all PC based laptops. This may be the thing that makes me switch to Apple?
It is just you.
Please - engadget make dozens of post a day, maybe we shouldn't make such a fuss over a tpyo!
11 - they move the touchpad to the center of the keyboard (below the spacebar) such that when you are touch-typing, the touchpad should be out of the way. When a numpad is added to the right, as a result the rest of the keyboard and touchpad move to the left.
Maximum 12 minutes battery power. Notebook may only be used on carbide metal plated furniture as wood may spontanously combust after 20 minutes of heat eminated from the notebook.
Lol, they fixed it. A Dell XPS with a 2.23 Pentium M and a 7800GTX would kill this any day.
When do we get good AMD gaming laptops? They run cooler, use less power, are faster, and cheaper? All they need is a good mobile chipset with a N-Force 4 mobile and they would kill this.
Aren't these the same people who have an article with the owner in an old issue of UFO magazine where he claims to have a stack of notebooks from Bell Labs that were the result of reverse-engineering Roswell crash debris in 1947?
They were posting weird claims about having used these notebooks to improve on transistor technology and were "incorporating" this "alien technology" into their computers.
I wouldn't buy or believe anything from the likes of these people.
my url didn't show up... just search google
http://www.google.com/search?q=compamerica+roswell
You say they're gonna make an Athlon 64FX/x2 version?!
Well I don't know how AMD are going to catch up with Intel now, especially now Intel have broken the 3.8 Mhz barrier! xD
actually, alienware and voodoo even use pretty much the same cases/components for their high-end laptops, but they choose to add some extra shit, color choices, and the drives are pretty much dependent on dealer-retailer relations, but i do beleive that voodoo has a laptop much like this one but you can get AMD processors and Slot-loading DVD+-RW drives, plus color selection.
Here is the url for the laptop with the FX and Dual Core AMDs by voodoo
http://www.voodoopc.com/system/quotekitchen.aspx?productID=1083
For awesome computers, http://www.go-l.com is the only way to go!
They mean 3.8 Ghz, right?
ok
I am John Davis, VP Product Management for CompAmerica in New Jersey...
I thank you all for your interest in our products. If any of you have a question you can simply call 888-275-2771 and speak to me or to Dr. Shulman, company CEO. Don't be concerned about calling: there are no "little people" who call on CompAmerica, everyone is treated equally.
To answer a few of your questions:
a) We do contract to have this laptop housing built in Taiwan, but the Mainboard is uniquely ours. This is not a Sager, and Clevo is one of three fabricators who make housings and mainboards for laptops in Taiwan, the other two are Compal and Quanta, and HP, Compaq, even Dell, purchase components from many of them too. For example, Compal builds for Dell. It is quite common place.
b) CompAmerica is not exactly a "boutique", we manufacture computers, and laptops, and servers, and we distribute other companies products, as do Dell, HP, IBM and so on. We were originally founded in 1971, by five executives from Bell Labs, Honeywell, Digital and IBM.
c) The ORCA 9000 has been shipping for a week now, and it has the very first of the NVIDIA 7800 GTX, an ungodly fast Video adapter. No other Laptop manufacturer in the industry has actually shipped the 7800 until THIS week. We also offer the Quadra FX 1400 for Cad Cam'ers. Which, for your readers, meant that we "held the top of the hill" for about a week on the hardware "most powerful" flag. ;-) Technology is always changing, but we still have a few features others do not.
d) We support the new DUAL CORE version of the Pentium 4 by virtue of the fact that we offer two variations of chipset on the 9000, one is INTEL 915 based, which does not, and the other is INTEL 945 based and does. We are also on all of them, offering Windows XP/64. All in all, since no other manufacturer does this for their laptops, yet, we believe that we still have the "most powerful laptop on earth" and will continue to until February or March. We also offer up to 4GB on our model, others are limited to 2GB on their laptops.
e) We use a very special Copper HeatSink, Sealed Flashover Cryotek and Fan combination to cool the CPU, the fan is surprisingly small, and quiet, given what it's cooling in the normally 125 degree Pentium 4 3.8/2M CPU. This technology has several compensating factors, as the sealed tubes that work not unlike an Air Conditioner, eliminate heat, while the cooper heatsink and the fan do more than sufficient heat dissipation without costing you in noise or excessive power demand. All in all, it's what we believe is the best cooling solution for this technology. Our goal was to keep the voltage on the Pentium 4 lower by running it below 100 degrees, to avoid corrosion to it's internal gates that plague all modern CPUs built below the 100 nanometer gate size.
One more note: it is interesting that you might mention Alienware and Voodoo, since neither offer Dual Core nor had the 7800 this past week, on their 17" laptops.
We also offer a Centrino variation of this product with the 7800, the 5720, which you can find on our website at the shortcut: http://www.laptopmaker.com which while not the most powerful Pentium 4 Laptop on earth, is the most powerful CENTRINO based Pentium M Laptop on earth. It has extremely long battery life, and is 3.6 pounds lighter than the ORCA 9000, yet it sports the same screen and video, and nearly the same performance when used with the 2.13GHz Pentium M.
We also offer a version of the ORCA with the AMD CPU up to 3800+ speed, for the writer who asked.
Last but not least, we have challenged Alienware on performance, since they started producing their neon colored versions of what appear to be copies of our products. We asked them to TRY AND EQUAL our "VIPER" workstation, publicly. Apparently they noticed the "alientel" project at CompAmerica back in the 90's (the "alien transistor") that caused such a stir and decided to copy the marketing ideas with very stylish cases and fancy coloring.
The VIPER is unequalled in performence, it can seriously outrun a Compaq Proliant or an IBM xServer in 8-way mode. It supports from 4 up to 8 XEON Single/HT or Dual Core CPUs, and up to 8 Serial ATA-300 Hard Drives, we ship it standard with a choice of (8) 500GB HDDs, 8GB to 64GB of DDRAM2, and three video boards like the ORCA, however adjusted upwards for the high end "Super PC Workstation" jet setters:
a) The base model comes with the 7800GTX from Nvidia
b) The enhanced model comes with the unreal speed of the 3DLABS WILDCAT REALISM 800 with 640MB of Video Memory and dual DVI output.
c) The Broadcast model comes with the remarkable NVIDIA FX-4450 SDI/DVI adapter that can deliver HDTV for Television Companies, as well as 1080p from its integral DVI port, for use by companies that have need to edit and broadcast Video in real time, this is probably the only machine capable. We offer BlueFish 444 adapters including the Greed and Catalyst through an integrated PCI/x 133MHz slot.
It is quite a bit more expensive than most of your daily PCs, however, as "multi-core" technology emerges from INTEL and AMD, we will see more traditional PCs reflecting VIPER's capabilities. Our standard PCs already support 5 and up SATA II Drives as well as 5 PATA drives, and DUAL CORE Pentium 4.
However, if any of you want "the most powerful Personal Computer" on earth, the VIPER will break any of your records, one of the only 8-Way Dual Core PCs with PCI-EXPRESS X-16 Graphics STANDARD. It can also be used as a Server, and we do have a varient called "the VIXEN" which while similar, offers Opteron 200 Dual Core technology from AMD. Surprisingly, the two chips (Opteron and the new 64 Bit Xeon) perform remarkably well in this application, when compared to each other, each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Note that all of CompAmerica's products are tested for compatibility with all of Microsoft's Windows and many of LINUX's builds, and are equally competant with both.
Have a great winter, and please feel free to give us a call if you have any questions!
Sincerely,
John
Does any one remember Sun's "Tadpole?" It was a SPARC (I believe) processor in a mobile workstation. After that came the Ultra 3 which was available with a 1.3GHz UltraSPARC. Anyways, both are likely more powerful than any x86 on the market today. Interesting that CompAmerica would make that claim.