While you may think a workstation is a place to sit down every day at the office, you’re both right and wrong.

Workstations are used primarily by CAD/CAM engineers and multimedia and entertainment designers – people who need their PCs to perform serious calculations for serious tasks like engineering and 3D graphics processing.

The trouble is that while there have been portable workstation options in the past, they just haven’t had the power needed to be a realistic option for demanding professionals.

The latest mobile workstations from MSI changes all that: it uses NVIDIA’s mobile Quadro GPUs to deliver the mobility and functionality professionals need in an ultra-slim package that’s easy on the eyes as well.

By using the 10th generation of NVIDIA’s GPU “Maxwell” architecture, performance has been doubled while power consumption has remained down.

To take full advantage of this, MSI has fitted its latest WS72 notebooks with Quadro M2000M, Quadro M1000M and Quadro M600M graphics processors.

All three of these GPUs offer a substantial upgrade on the previous generation of Quadro cards; for starters the number of CUDA cores in each iteration has been increased, and faster, more efficient GDDR5 memory is now being used in all cards.

What all of this means for the end user is that performance is up by more than 50% in some instances of the SPECviewperf 12 benchmark.

But that’s not all: the M2000M GPU also outperforms its predecessor, the K2100M by as much as 64% in the Creo benchmark, 98% in the Maya benchmark and 112% when being tested in Solidworks. Even the lower-powered M600M GPU gives users a boost in performance. The M600M is 17% better when benchmarked in Creo, 25% in Maya and 20% in Solidworks.

Considering that these GPUs are designed to give designers and engineers every ounce of power they need, even a small boost like the M600M offers, is enough to make a big difference.

Now, all this power is well and good, but it doesn’t help if you have to use a forklift to transport your notebook, and you won’t because the WS72 is designed to be portable and move where you move.

By crafting the chassis from aluminium, MSI has kept the weight of this portable workstation down to just 2.55kg. Despite such a light weight and a crazy thickness of just 19.9mm, the WS72 still provides you with a 17inch display.

All of this combines to give users the portability they need without having to sacrifice specifications just so their notebook fits in their carry bags.

To find out more check out the official MSI website.