In case you missed it, it was Eurocom's Phantom-X that managed to swipe that "fastest tested laptop" mark from the MacBook Pro last year -- and totally ruin a perfectly good commercial. Now the company is back for more with the M860TU Montebello 15.4-incher. We'll have to wait for the benchmarks to see how this one stacks up against the recent crop of Penryn laptops, but what's new here is that the Centrino 2 "Montevina" chipset is under the hood, which should support faster Penryn processors, lower power consumption and some new fancy security features. Other specs on the M860TU include a 15.4-inch 1920 x 1200 LCD, 512MB NVIDIA 8800M GTX graphics (with a future option for 9xxxM GTX chips once they're announced), 4GB of RAM, HSDPA and external eSATA and HDMI plugs. Yeah, pretty hot. No word on price, but the laptop is slated to ship May 1st.

So there's a bit of grumbling on the internets that PC World, like, totally sold out and lied about the MacBook Pro being the fastest Vista laptop they ever tested (presumably just so they could get mentioned in that new Apple commercial, right?) shortly before the staff went cow tipping and passed out drunk in a public park. The reality is PC World apparently hadn't tested a laptop faster than the MacBook Pro at the time, and it wasn't until weeks later they tested the Eurocom D900C Phantom-X, which handily bested Apple's lappie by a broad margin. At least that's what PC World's editor Harry McCracken told us, but then again we did hear he recently got an Apple tat and is planning a hostile takeover of Macworld magazine in '08.

Read - PC World's statement about the MBP
Read - ... and their review of the Eurocom
Read - The punter doing the grumbling
Watch - The Apple ad

Good news for those waiting in tense anticipation for a confirmation on Eurocom's quad-core lappie: it's for real. Dubbed the D900C Phantom-X, this powerhouse will reportedly pack Intel's "newest line of quad-core processors," up to 750GB of internal HDD space, your choice of NVIDIA GPUs running in single or dual SLI, a Blu-ray optical drive, up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and a slew of ports including USB 2.0, FireWire, DVI, S-Video, a multicard reader, optical and analog audio in / out, and a gigabit Ethernet jack for good measure. 'Course, you'll also find integrated Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11a/b/g, stereo speakers, a built-in microphone, and an optional TV tuner that could certainly make you question the necessity of your desktop. So, you big spender you, go on and get your order in now and let the bragging commence -- if you've got the $2,999 it'll take for the base configuration, that is.

[Thanks, Mark B.]

They may not boast a name like the "F-Bomb," but Eurocom's new all-in-one LV190 and LV220 ViiVA systems look like they should be able to garner a fair bit of attention on their own. Boasting 19- and 22-inch widescreen displays, respectively, the systems can be configured with your choice of Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme processors, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics, a max 4GB of RAM, up to two 500GB hard drives, and an internal TV tuner, among other options. Knocking things down a notch, however, is the somewhat lackluster 1680 x 1050 resolution on the 22-inch display, and an even lower 1440 x 900 on the 19-incher. If that's not a deal breaker for ya', you can get your order in now, with systems starting around $1,500 and going up considerably as you pack on the upgrades.

We've definitely seen some shady reports of a quad-core laptop make the rounds, and it looks like geographically misnamed Canadian laptop outfit Eurocom is going to be first off the line with a Intel Core 2 Quad notebook. A Eurocom spokesperson apparently confirmed to Laptoping that the company is prepping a quad-core Phantom D900C -- which probably means that monster-laptop Clevo (or whichever company is their ODM) is working on a quad-core D900C, since the Phantom is yet another rebrand. Laptoping says the 17-inch machine will feature a 2.4GHz Q6600 "Kentsfield" Core 2 Quad and dual SLI-capable GeForce Go 8700 or Quadro FX3500 graphics, an HD DVD drive, and up to three drives that can be run as a RAID 0/1/5 array -- all of which means battery life on this 11.9-pound monster will probably run down faster than a 6-minute mile. Still, the idea of stuffing four cores into a laptop gets us all excited, but the current $3,200 pricetag on the dual-core Phantom doesn't bode too well for the double the power.

With the way CompAmerica goes around bragging about the superiority of its laptops, you'd think that the company was some high end, boutique gaming manufacturer -- instead of one of the many companies simply offering rebadge after rebadge. Just like other 'bigger than life' players such as Eurocom and Rock, ol' CA makes most of its loot selling machines originally available from Clevo, so it should be no surprise that its latest 'most powerful laptop on Earth' -- the 17-inch Orca Extreme -- is really just that D900C we saw last month. You know, Core 2 Extreme CPU, dual GeForce 7950 GTX cards in SLI, up to 4GB of RAM, and of course those three hard drives that can offer up to 600GB of storage in RAID 0. This whale of a laptop can be yours immediately -- that is, if you don't already own one of its doppelgangers -- starting right around $2,600.

[Via laptoping]

Okay, so right off the bat: do they even know what it means to drop the f-bomb in Canada? We've seen a lot of ridiculously-named products around here -- Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PooS come immediately to mind -- but this Eurocom model, with its allusion to the most hardcore cuss word in the English language, is by far one of the worst. Besides the unfortunate branding, however, the company's 17-inch D900K gaming notebook sounds like a pretty good performer; according to MobilityGuru the dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 processor and nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX graphics card help it to achieve pretty impressive benchmark results. You're also getting a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution display, DVD burner, 802.11a/b/g, DVI out, and 4-in-1 card reader for the $3,500 pricetag, though the 5,200 RPM hard drive and 1GB of pokey 200MHz DDR RAM keep this rig from delivering the outstanding results you'd get from a machine like Dell's XPS M1710. Still, if you can't afford a Dell (we never thought we'd actually say that) and don't mind lugging around 15 pounds of gear to get your mobile computing on, you may not find this particular F-bomb to be all that offensive.