We were expecting to see the first mobile Evergreens in an Alienware or something, but Acer seems bent on establishing a presence in the insane high-end market.

We're not huge fans of gaming notebooks and we would buy this one in a million years, but we have to respect the sheer lunacy of the Aspire 8942G-728G1280TWN. Powered by a Core i7-720QM at 1.6GHz, it packs 8GB of DDR3, two 640GB hard drives and Blu-ray to boot. It features an 18.4-inch LED display in 1980x1080 and then we come to its piece de resistance, AMD's Mobile Radeon HD5850 with 1GB of GDDR5. Basically, this is the first notebook with DirectX 11 graphics, and pretty good graphics at that.

In terms of connectivity, you get pretty much everything you could ask for on such a device, 4 USB 2.0 slots, 802.11 abgn, Bluetooth, ExpressCard, HDMI, 5-in-1 card reader and a host of other goodies. Of course, all this nonsense comes at a price in sheer size. With an 8-cell battery, the DX11 Aspire weighs 4.6kg, almost as much as two average 15-inchers.

Sadly we still don't know the exact price or availability date, but we're guessing it will appear in early January.