About a week and a half ago, I picked up the Gateway P-7811 FX at Best Buy for $1250 (on sale -- current price ~$1450). Here's the specs:
I bought the laptop because it comes with DDR3 RAM, and has a GeForce 9800M GTS 512MB video card -- and because I paid less than half the price of something comparable from Dell, Toshiba, or HP.
In a word, it's awesome. I'll probably gush a bit, so I'll get the "dislikes" out of the way first. It's pretty heavy, though as "desktop replacement" laptops go it's about average. It's got some garish orange trim, and the indicator lights for WiFi, hard drive, etc. are a bit too bright. The media buttons (play, stop, track skip, etc.) are oddly cut from the bezel and don't "click" when you push them, but I don't use them much anyway. The volume control is a touch strip, which takes a bit of getting used to, but is actually kind of cool IMHO. The touchpad is... a touchpad, nothing to see here. It's got a full numeric keypad, and the keys have nice travel to them. The arrow keys live under the Enter key, but don't get in the way.
The performance blows me away. It ships with Vista Home Premium x64, and I just benchmarked at an "Experience Index" of 5.2 without any kind of tweaking or driver updates. I've been running a bunch of Source-engine games (TF2, HL2 episodes, etc) and they run like butter at maximum resolution. I've got the Supreme Commander demo -- no problem. I don't have anything that's *really* cutting edge, but I haven't found a game to throw at it that it won't handle with gusto.
Long story short, I love it. It's a steal of a deal, and I don't know what more I could ask for.
| Quote: |
| Processor Platform
Intel Centrino 2 # Processor Intel Core(TM)2 Duo # Processor Speed 2.26GHz # Display Type WUXGA TFT widescreen (1920 x 1200) # Screen Size 17" # System Bus 1066MHz # Cache Memory 3MB on die level 2 # System Memory (RAM) 4GB # Type of Memory (RAM) PC-6400 DDR3 # Hard Drive Type Serial ATA (7200 rpm) # Hard Drive Size 200GB # Optical Drive Double-layer DVD±RW/CD-RW # Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS # Video Memory 512MB GDDR3 |
I bought the laptop because it comes with DDR3 RAM, and has a GeForce 9800M GTS 512MB video card -- and because I paid less than half the price of something comparable from Dell, Toshiba, or HP.
In a word, it's awesome. I'll probably gush a bit, so I'll get the "dislikes" out of the way first. It's pretty heavy, though as "desktop replacement" laptops go it's about average. It's got some garish orange trim, and the indicator lights for WiFi, hard drive, etc. are a bit too bright. The media buttons (play, stop, track skip, etc.) are oddly cut from the bezel and don't "click" when you push them, but I don't use them much anyway. The volume control is a touch strip, which takes a bit of getting used to, but is actually kind of cool IMHO. The touchpad is... a touchpad, nothing to see here. It's got a full numeric keypad, and the keys have nice travel to them. The arrow keys live under the Enter key, but don't get in the way.
The performance blows me away. It ships with Vista Home Premium x64, and I just benchmarked at an "Experience Index" of 5.2 without any kind of tweaking or driver updates. I've been running a bunch of Source-engine games (TF2, HL2 episodes, etc) and they run like butter at maximum resolution. I've got the Supreme Commander demo -- no problem. I don't have anything that's *really* cutting edge, but I haven't found a game to throw at it that it won't handle with gusto.
Long story short, I love it. It's a steal of a deal, and I don't know what more I could ask for.
Would make a fun slideshow. Trust me, that poorly coded game will make any laptop look slow.
