Gamer Laptop Reviews – Eurocom Monster 1.0

Welcome back to our Eurocom Monster 1.0 review and we continue where we left off last week. This small yet powerful gaming laptop has a webcam which has been installed in the upper screen bezel, while to preserve battery life it benefits from the Nvidia Optimus technology which as most of you know will turn off the dedicated video card and use only the integrated chip when the user is running apps which are not graphics-intensive.

It might not impress you with its size but once you find out what’s under its hood you will certainly be amazed. At the heart of the Eurocom Monster 1.0 is a third-generation Intel Core i7-3720QM processor based on the Ivy Bridge platform, a CPU that runs at a clock speed of 2.70 GHz. In the memory department it packs 8GB of DDR3 RAM, allowing the gaming laptop to score 4,273 points in PCMark 7 which is better than many other systems, such as the IdeaPad Y480 from Lenovo which costs $1,000 or the considerably more expensive MSI GT783-625US which will set you back no less than about $2,600. The latter would have to be a much larger 17-inch gaming laptop.

Let’s have a look in the graphics department where we find the now standard Intel HD 4000 integrated chip with shared system memory, along with the dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 650M video card. It is a mid-range GPU which allows the Eurocom Monster 1.0 to score 726 in 3DMark 11 which is considerably lower than the 1,056 points achieved by the MSI GT783-625US. This difference is understandable since the latter is powered by a high-end Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M.

Even so, the 11-inch Monster 1.0 still has plenty of power, being able to run Crysis at medium quality settings at 1,024 x 768-pixel resolution at 85.7 FPS while at the native resolution with the highest graphics settings turned on, the system can score 39.3 FPS which makes the game more than playable. Although this result is slower than the 97.3 FPS and 41.3 FPS, respectively, achieved by the MSI, it still makes it faster than the Alienware M11x r3 as well as the Lenovo Y480.

Eurocom has fitted the Monster 1.0 gaming laptop with a six-cell 62Wh battery which during a MobileMark 2007 test is capable of providing enough juice for approximately three and a half hours, which is a great performance taking into consideration the powerful hardware components of the laptop. It might not offer the longest battery life seen in such a small 11-inch laptop, but it is without any doubt one of the most powerful on sale today, especially now since Dell has decided to stop making the above mentioned Alienware M11x r3 so there aren’t a lot of options to choose from.

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