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GCN Home > 06/23/08 issue

A movable feast of computing

GCN Lab review: The laptop-like Raptor 4 is actually a portable server with impressive power and features

By John Breeden II

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As Sigmund Freud might have said, sometimes a laptop is just a laptop. But this is not one of those times.

The Ace Raptor 4 looks like the biggest laptop PC ever built, as though it were specifically designed for a National Basketball Association center with huge hands. It measures 12 inches long, 15 inches wide and 2.35-inches thick. And at 11.5 pounds, it is a bit too heavy to just whip out when you need to type a couple of quick e-mails in an airport lounge. A good way to think of the Raptor 4 is that it’s movable but not really portable.

Obviously, there is more to the Raptor 4 than just being a laptop for giants. It is a pretty ingenious server setup in a laptop form factor.

When we first saw this configuration at the FOSE trade show, we were impressed enough to give the Raptor 4 our judge’s award based on the implementation of a great idea: making a truly portable — or at least movable — server. But we really wanted to kick the tires and give the Raptor a full workout, so we had one sent to the lab.

Image: GCN
The Raptor 4 we tested turned out to be a true workhorse. Powered by an Intel Xeon X3350 processor running at 2.66 GHz, it smoked most workstation computers with a score of 1,327 on our Pass- Mark Performance Test 6.1 benchmarks from PassMark Software.

For comparison, the fastest ultraportable laptop in the most recent roundup scored 497. Most servers we have looked at since implementing the new benchmarks have tested in the 800s.

One reason for its prime performance is its 1.3 GHz front-side bus and huge 12M cache that keep data from getting trapped moving around the system. And the 4G of RAM does not hurt its performance.

Even the Raptor’s storage is set up in a server configuration. The 840G of storage can be configured to Redundant Array of Independent Disks 0, 1 or 5. The unit we tested was set up in RAID 1 for complete redundancy in case either storage drive fails. This reduced the amount of storage available, but complete redundancy in a mobile server is a good idea. If you don’t care to go that way, you can opt for RAID 5, which offers some protection, or RAID 0, which gives you access to all available storage at the risk of a single drive failure killing all your data.

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