If price were no object and you did not care much about weight or battery life, what is the fastest and most potent laptop you can build today?

The team at DigitalReviews Network set out to do just that and came up with arguably the fastest, street legal notebook - at least here in Australia. Come and meet the ITC METABOX 740u (Clevo D900T).

It's an unprecedented heavyweight, featuring, among other things, the Nvidia GeForce Go 7800 GTX, a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4, two 100GB 7200rpm SATA hard drives running in RAID 0 or 1 configuration and all the connectivity you would ever need…

Chuck in a HD TV tuner with remote-control and you know you've got something special here.

This is Part I of a three-part in-depth review of the ITC METABOX 740u (Clevo D900T).

This will cover our first impressions of this amazing machine with plenty of photographs and a list of all the features.

Part II will cover the in-depth benchmarking and Part III will give a comparison with the METABOX 730u, which is one of the fastest Centrino-based notebooks around and the first to come with an Nvidia GeForce GO 7800 GTX.

When we scoured the Australian marketplace for a desktop replacement computer which could also function as a platform for testing applications we found Perth-based ITC being able to custom build our ideal system, based on the Clevo D900T.

We went for the highest possible specifications on the 17” WUXGA METABOX 740, blowing our budget by 200% but producing a preliminary 3DMark05 benchmark score of 6479 and a 3DMark03 score of 14607. These scores are for a straight-out-of-the-box machine.

It was the night before Christmas with not a dead pixel in sight…

That turned out to be the perfect scenario when we unpacked the new laptop.

The ITC METABOX 740u was very well-prepared for shipment as you can tell from the photos.

Lots of protective plastic everywhere and it was evident that ITC takes great care in assembling and shipping.

The hernia-causing heavyweight certainly looks the part: the METABOX means business!

Ports, bays and buttons bristled everywhere.

Normally, ITC ships their laptops with Windows installed and fully tested.

We installed our own OS and did our own formatting. This process requires an external floppy drive for loading the RAID drivers.

The machine comes with the usual software CDs to install the various drivers and application programs.

When we plugged in the power my workstation PC instantly died!

Not from shame, although it could have, but it was on the same power circuit and the power draw of the METABOX was just too much…

We clocked the power consumption later at well over 200W when playing certain games!!

- Introduction, Setup

- Specifications, The Ultimate Notebook?

- 3DMark05 & 3DMark03, Overclocking