There was a time not that long ago when you couldn't touch a high-end laptop without spending a fortune, let alone a gaming grade notebook by a boutique builder. Now you can, as evidenced by Digital Storm's X17E, a 17-inch laptop built for gamers on an artist's budget. Pricing starts at $1,753, though you can go all out and pony up for an Intel Core i7 3920XM processor overclocked to 4.5GHz, among other upgrade options.

IFA Berlin is in full swing and we're starting to see a number of Windows 8 product announcements emerge. One of them is Toshiba's Satellite U925t convertible tablet, or "tablet meets Ultrabook," as the company describes it. Sleek and slim, the Satellite U925t looks every bit a tablet, but a slide out QWERTY keyboard quickly transforms it into a makeshift Ultrabook with some pretty impressive hardware inside.

MSI describes its flagship G Series GT70 0NE as "the most awesome gaming notebook ever," a description we're sure its competitors would disagree with, though you can't argue with the laundry list of high end parts crammed underneath the hood. The newest piece of hardware to crawl inside MSI's GT70 laptop is Nvidia's GeForce GTX 680M GPU, only the fastest mobile graphics chip currently available.

Before anyone asks, the answer is yes, Origin's new EON17-SLX laptop with support for up to two discrete GPUs has enough horsepower to carry Crysis on its back while lugging around a sack of eye candy. Even without dual graphics cards, the EON17-SLX is, on paper, a pretty potent system with the requisite hardware to properly drive a 17.3-inch display with a Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) resolution.