A laptop with more ports than you'd ever need AND two disc drives? — This viral gaming rig from 20 years ago channels peak Alienware energy

Old tech has a way of sending me back to a nostalgic past, and that's exactly what happened this week when I came across what some are calling "The Master Laptop" that's straight out of 2006.

I was first (re)introduced to this gargantuan "mobile" gaming PC in a stylized video posted on the PCMasterRace subreddit by X user @PcPhilanthropy, which shoots a closeup of the laptop as it spins on a platter. Revealed is a monstrously thick 17-inch frame that is a great reminder of how far gaming laptops have come in recent years.

A collection of ancient ports on the back end, including VGA, DVI Video, Parallel, and PS/2, gives way to a USB-A bank, a couple of Firewire ports, a row of 3.5mm audio connections, S-Video, and several readers for removable storage and PCMCIA.

It's all quite functional, and the laptop really starts to display its finesse when we get to the front edge. There we see some oversized grilles that cover four user-facing speakers, divided by a glossy panel with four dedicated media control buttons and a digital display panel. From the front, it reminds me of some fancier modern Bluetooth speakers.

Turning to the right side of the laptop, this is where things really start to get good. Remember disc drives? Yeah, me too. This thing has two of them, one stacked above the other. If I had this laptop, you know I'd be popping in my Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds discs.

Is "The Master Laptop" a real PC?

The stylized presentation of the video had me thinking it was AI-generated for a few moments, but this is indeed a real PC in a real shoot.

It seems that it's a Clevo 900T, a model that was popular in the early '00s. Founded in 1983, Clevo remains today a huge supplier of reference designs to laptop brands, which buy the chassis and put their own spin on it.

Alienware is one notable brand that took Clevo's design and jazzed it up with its own logos and stylings. IGN has a 20-year-old Alienware M7700 review still available to read if you'd like more info.

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Several other companies, including Sager, made use of Clevo's 17-inch design to produce gaming laptops that sound more like a jet engine taking off than a few small fans. Sager's website includes a user's manual with a deep dive on how it works.

I spent some time digging around for more info about the PC, and I came across this video from the YouTube channel "J-Tech Workshop" that provides a full teardown. It's well worth a watch if you're interested in this sort of thing.

What the heck is a "Sager" laptop? (D900t/ Alienware M7700) - YouTube

Watch On

What sort of performance hardware comes in this massive gaming laptop?

It's always amusing to see how older PC gamers like me react to huge laptops jammed full of ports and hardware. One user in the PCMasterRace subreddit posted a picture of their D900K, an AMD-powered version of the D900T.

Inside, it's explained, is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU, two sticks of 1GB DDR-400 RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX GPU with 512MB VRAM. That's some righteous mobile hardware for 2006.

Comment from r/pcmasterrace

Should we go back to gaming laptops like this?

Are you old wise enough to remember when powerful gaming laptops looked like this blast from the past? Do you yearn for dual disc drives and more ports than you could ever use at once? Please let me know in the comments section!

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