There's a line in the sand between notebooks and desktop replacements, and once you cross it, your system is no longer mobile, it's portable. The AVA Direct P180HM weighs upwards of 12 pounds, which is too heavy to toss into your bag on a whim or open up in a coffee shop and blend in inconspicuously with the other patrons. No, you carefully close up the P180HM, lift with two hands, and pack it neatly into your oversized laptop bag that's big enough to accommodate an 18.4-inch notebook. When you take it out at Starbucks, you mark off your area with yellow tape, tell everyone to stand back, and then place it on the coffee table with a thud. Your latte sits on the floor next to your foot, because there isn't room for it on the table, and because the P180HM would probably guzzle it up anyway.

The trade off you're making with systems like the AVA Direct P180HM is far less mobility for a whole heck of a lot more power in a form factor that's still portable. To wit, the customizable P180HM we received rocks a fast Core i7-2760QM quad-core processor, a heaping pile of RAM (12GB), and not one, but two GeForce GTX 560M GPUs configured in SLI. It's built for gaming on the go, and with an 18.4-inch LED backlit display, it's big enough to at least consider using as your main system at home.