A situation that still happens more often than we like is that we'll find a seemingly tantalizing deal on a gaming laptop, then discover the manufacturer skimped on storage—a 256GB SSD is serviceable, but not the least bit exciting, and 128GB SSD is just insulting (that's just one game in some cases). Eurocom must have heard our groans because its new Nightsky RX 15 can be configured with a whopping 16TB of SSD storage.
According to Eurocom, that's a world record for a "lightweight" laptop. It weighs 5.5 pounds, which is certainly lighter than some gaming laptops out there, particularly ones that fall into the desktop replacement category. It's not class-leading, though—for example, MSI's GS65 Stealth Thin weighs just 4.14 pounds.
Still, it's an impressive amount of a storage for a consumer laptop. Unfortunately, any buyer on a sensible budget will find 16TB in this case to be cost prohibitive. To arrive at 16TB, you need to configure the Nightsky RX 15 with a pair of Sabrent Rocket 4TB NVMe SSDs priced at $2,083 each, and a Micron 5100 Enterprise 8TB SSD (SATA) priced at $3,945.
Folks, that's a total of $8,111 just for storage. It's downright puzzling that Eurocom is charging so much for these SSDs. I double checked and they're not dipped in gold or platinum.
At least the Sabrent Rocket models are fast, though not the speediest out there. They offer up to 3,000MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 1,400MB/s of sequential write performance.
Outside of the storage configuration, you can outfit the Nightsky RX 15 other premium hardware. I did some window shopping to see what would be possible with unlimited funds. Here's a look:
- Intel Core i9-9980HK CPU
- 64GB DDR4-2666 RAM
- GeForce RTX 2070 GPU
- 16TB total SSD storage
- Killer Wi-Fi 6 adapter
- Windows 10 Professional
The total came to $11,967. Upgrade options are a bit limited—the fastest RAM available is DDR4-3000, and there are only two GPUs to choose from, the RTX 2070 or GTX 1660 Ti.
A more sensible configuration (16GB of RAM instead of 32GB, and a 500GB SSD) drops the priced to $3,092, which is still expensive. Part of the premium is due to the 15.6-inch OLED display with a 4K resolution and 600 nits brightness. Still, three grand shuttles this past bang-for-buck territory.
The Nightsky RX 15 is available now, in case you're interested in one or just want to window shop like I did.
