Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the x17 is its pitiful battery life. Although hulking desktop replacements aren't known for their excellent battery life, I still expect one to last at least 3 hours. Unfortunately, in PCWorld's tests the x17 barely scraped past 2 hours, 20 minutes. Such a result is definitely disappointing, though not a deal-breaker (after all, this system is hardly meant for toting about).

While the Digital Storm x17 is an excellent desktop replacement laptop specs-wise, the rest of the package isn't impressive. Digital Storm makes no attempt to pretty up its machine--the laptop doesn't even sport any fancy lights (and we all know that gamers love fancy lights), and the rest of the design is average or slightly below. The screen quality, sound quality, and keyboard/touchpad quality are also below average. Even if you care about performance and nothing else--not design, not portability, not usability--I would still suggest that you go for a instead of the x17.