Eurocom has announced a new upgrade option to its Panther range of notebooks: the six-core Intel Xeon X5690.

The Eurocom Panther 2.0 isn't your average desktop replacement, featuring up to 24GB of triple-channel DDR3 RAM, your choice of dual-Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M 2GB cards in SLI or a Quadro FX 5000M 2GB graphics card, and Intel's 32nm Xeon X5690 six-core CPU running at 3.46GHz with a shared L3 cache of 12MB.

The Panther 2.0 also features up to four hard drives, offering up to 3.25TB storage in a RAID 0, 1, 5, or 10 configuration. Finally, a 17in 1920x1080 display completes the package.

The Eurocom Panther 2.0, as the specifications above attest, isn't designed around the same principles as your average notebook: weighing in at 5.3Kg, it's not a laptop to be carrying around with you as a daily-use machine. Rather, Eurocom positions its Panther range as 'mobile servers,' designed to offer a luggable alternative to fully-fledged rack-mount servers, complete with built-in - albeit brief - UPS.

The idea behind Eurocom's Panther range is to provide a reasonably portable system for those who require high-performance computing on the go, either as a demonstration unit for a sales team or as a hot-swap emergency replacement for a server engineer.

As you might imagine with such a brief, the pricing puts the Panther range out of the reach of the average gamer: a fully-loaded Panther 2.0 system with Xeon X5690, dual-GeForce GTX 480M 2GB, 24GB of RAM, and a single 320GB hard disk comes in at a wallet-busting £6,610.

Still, if you're looking for a laptop that will play Crysis, the Panther is probably your best bet, and represents a significant performance boost over the company's Panther D900F Mobile Workstation.

Are you amazed at the amount of hardware Eurocom can cram in to a system and still call it a notebook, or is the Panther series nothing more than a niche product? Share your thoughts over in the forums.