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Eurocom M590K Emperor review: Eurocom M590K Emperor

We recommend the Eurocom M590K Emperor only to the most hard-core mobile gamers who need a big, powerful laptop to compete with desktop PC gaming rigs.

Justin Jaffe Managing editor
Justin Jaffe is the Managing Editor for CNET Money. He has more than 20 years of experience publishing books, articles and research on finance and technology for Wired, IDC and others. He is the coauthor of Uninvested (Random House, 2015), which reveals how financial services companies take advantage of customers -- and how to protect yourself. He graduated from Skidmore College with a B.A. in English Literature, spent 10 years in San Francisco and now lives in Portland, Maine.
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  • Coauthor of Uninvested (Random House, 2015)
Justin Jaffe
6 min read
While it's not the first laptop we've heard of that features a 19-inch display and two graphics cards running in a scalable link interface, the Eurocom M590K Emperor is the first such laptop we've laid hands on. And we like both marquee features very much: the laptop offers one of the most impressive gaming experiences money can buy. That said, as with most products equipped with new technologies, the M590K Emperor is particularly expensive (our loaded configuration cost $5,430)--even for a high-end gaming laptop--and especially in light of the fact that you can get almost as many frames per second from far less expensive systems, though only a few other niche vendors offer 19-inch models at this time (original equipment manufacturer Clevo is said to have built a similar model for Sager and SavRow). We recommend the M590K Emperor only to deadly serious, mobile gamers who are willing to spend top dollar for a system that's more portable than any desktop PC gaming rig.

The M590K Emperor is the largest laptop we've ever seen: It runs just shy of 19 inches wide, approximately 13.5 inches deep, and more than 2 inches thick. Weighing 14.7 pounds on its own, and 17.7 with its immense AC adapter, you do not want to make a habit out of carrying this laptop around; that said, the M590K Emperor is far more portable than even the smallest desktop PC gaming rigs from Alienware, Shuttle, and Falcon Northwest, with which it is intended to compete. On the other hand, there are other gaming laptops that offer comparable performance in a smaller package: the 17-inch XPS M1710 weighs less than 9 pounds. We found the M590K Emperor to be a bit rickety; the hinges creaked a bit when we moved the lid, though the lid itself seemed fairly sturdy.

7.9

Eurocom M590K Emperor

The Good

Excellent 19-inch display; best-in-class gaming performance; top-shelf SLI graphics engine; solid assortment of A/V features and connections.

The Bad

Very expensive; runs hot; mushy keyboard.

The Bottom Line

We recommend the Eurocom M590K Emperor only to the most hard-core mobile gamers who need a big, powerful laptop to compete with desktop PC gaming rigs.

The M590K Emperor includes a full-size keyboard, and a dedicated (though rather squished) number pad, as found on other large desktop replacements, such as the HP Pavilion dv8000 and the Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV600. We found the keyboard too mushy for extensive typing but totally adequate for the purposes of gaming. The M590K Emperor's touch pad and mouse buttons are all very big--again, another plus for gaming.

For any gaming laptop, audio and visual interfaces are critical. With a 19-inch diagonal display, the M590K Emperor unquestionably has the competition beat on size. Though the 1,680x1,050 native resolution is lower than that of some 17-inch laptops, the M590K Emperor's display offers a nice balance of screen real estate, crispness, and readability. It's bright, too: with our Minolta LS-100 luminance meter, we measured its maximum brightness at 192cd/m², compared to the XPS M1710's 170 cd/m². Though the M590K Emperor's four stereo speakers lack the rich bass tones we got from the Qomsio G35-AV600, they're loud and clear and delivered excellent audio quality overall in our tests. Above the display sits a 1.3-megapixel Webcam.

Gamers will find almost all of the ports, jacks, slots and connections they'll need on the M590K Emperor. Audio ports include headphone and microphone jacks, a line-in jack, and an S/PDIF output. Video ports include S-Video (output and input), VGA and DVI outputs, and a connection for an external antenna, so that you can tune in a noncable television signal. There are also five USB 2.0 ports and one four-pin FireWire port. Networking connections include Gigabit Ethernet; 56K modem, Intel PRO 802.11a/b/g wireless (a $95 upgrade), and Bluetooth (a $79 upgrade). Finally, you get an 8X multiformat, double-layer DVD burner, a 4-in-1 media card reader, and a Type II PC Card slot; there's no support for ExpressCards. Eurocom keeps the included software to a minimum. You can have your choice of Microsoft Windows XP Home, XP Professional, XP Professional x64, or Linux; our test unit came with XP Pro.

Priced at $5,430, our M590K Emperor unit came configured with extremely high-end components; the base configuration costs approximately $3,500. The Eurocom M590K Emperor is the first laptop we've tested to feature a scalable link interface configuration, using two Nvidia GeForce Go 7800GTX graphics cards with a total of 512MB of video GDDR3 memory. Also onboard were a 2.21GHz AMD Turion 64 MT-40 processor; 2GB of DDR RAM (400MHz); and a 100GB, 5,400rpm hard drive. For the sake of comparison, we also tested two late-model 17-inch gaming laptops: the $4,215 Dell XPS M1710, configured with one newer Nvidia GPU, as well as a $1,999 Toshiba Satellite P105-S921, also configured with one slightly lower-end Nvidia card, the GeForce Go 7900 GS.

Running the M590K Emperor through CNET Labs' benchmarks yielded some interesting results. For one thing, it ran fairly hot; to the left of the touch pad was an especially warm location. The M590K Emperor delivered nearly 122 frames per second (fps) in our Doom 3 test, compared with the XPS M170's 108fps; the Satellite P105-S921 notched about 86fps, on a par with Dell's previous XPS model, the M170. We found similar margins in our F.E.A.R. test, in which the M590K Emperor again took a slight edge over the XPS M1710 with 75fps. In our SysMark test, however, which tests the processor rather than the GPU, the M590K Emperor trailed all other systems, with score of 163. Clearly, the M590K Emperor offers a very high-end gaming experience, but you can have almost as many frames per second for more than $1,000 less with the XPS M1710, and you can have a totally adequate experience with any of the other systems for far less than that. The one thing you can't have on any of those other systems is the 19-inch display. (We did not run a battery life test on the M590K Emperor.)

Eurocom, located in Canada, backs the Emperor M590K with an industry-standard one-year warranty for depot service; onsite service (in Canada and the States) is available for an additional $125. You can extend the warranty for up to three years, and Eurocom offers accidental damage protection for up to three years (see more details here). For a laptop this pricey, we recommend shelling out for the extended the warranty. The company offers 24/7 tech support via phone and e-mail.

SysMark 2004 performance
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
BAPCo SysMark 2004 Rating  
SysMark 2004 Internet content creation  
SysMark 2004 office productivity  
Dell XPS M1710
220 
313 
154 
Gateway NX850XL
204 
278 
150 
Toshiba Satellite P105-S921
196 
257 
150 
Dell XPS M170
170 
209 
138 
Eurocom M590K Emperor
163 
198 
135 

Doom 3 High Quality, 10x7, 4XAA
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Id Software/ActiVision's Doom 3 (frames per second)  
Eurocom M590K Emperor
121.8 
Gateway NX850XL
81.8 

F.E.A.R. 10x7, 4XAA
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Monolith's/VU Games' F.E.A.R. (frames per second)  
Eurocom M590K Emperor
75 
Gateway NX850XL
40 

System configurations:
Dell XPS M170
Windows XP Media Center Edition; 2.26GHz Pentium M-780; 1GB PC 4200 DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; Nvidia GeForce Go 7800 GTX 256MB; Fujitsu MHV2100AH 100GB 5,400rpm

Dell XPS M1710
Windows XP Media Center Edition; 2.16GHz Core Duo-T2600; 2GB PC 5300 DDR2 SDRAM 666MHz; Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB; Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 100GB 7,200rpm

Eurocom M590K Emperor
Windows XP Professional; 2.21GHz Turion 64-T-40; 2GB PC 3200 DDR SDRAM 400MHz; Nvidia GeForce Go 7800 GTX 256MB (each); Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB 7,200rpm

Gateway NX850XL
Windows XP Media Center Edition; 2GHz Core Duo-T2500; 1GB PC 5300 DDR2 SDRAM 666MHz; Nvidia GeForce Go 7800 256MB; Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 80GB 7,200rpm

Toshiba Satellite P105-S921
Windows XP Professional; 1.83GHz Core Duo-T2400; 1GB PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM 666MHz; Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GS 256MB; Fujitsu MHV2160BT 160GB 4,200rpm

7.9

Eurocom M590K Emperor

Score Breakdown

Design 6Features 7Performance 10Support 5