Gateway P-7811FX, What a bargain.
Fast and cheap sums this machine up. Gateway has updated its FX gaming notebook lineup with Intel’s newest high-performance Centrino 2 mobile chipset, and the result is the $1,399 P-7811FX. That’s an excellent price to performance ratio which is hard to find in the gaming laptop category. (It’s currently available only at Best Buy.) Despite the excellence, it’s still a midrange model that can’t compete with higher-priced notebooks, however it’s the fastest notebook tested at this price range. Which makes this a good deal.
Whats under the hood? The Centrino 2 chipset, which gives better performance, improved wireless range, better battery life, and compatibility with new DDR3 memory. Operating this show is a 2.26-GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU and 4GB of DDR3-800 RAM. It uses the 64-bit version of Vista to take advantage of all that memory (32-bit versions can only use 3GB.) Storage is handled by a speedy 200GB 7,200rpm hard drive, and you can also add a second drive to the system.
What’s even more mouthwatering than the new chipset is the presence of Nvidia’s newest mobile video card, the GeForce 9800M GTS with 512MB of memory. The P-7811FX features a DVD burner instead of a Blu-ray drive, which isn’t surprising given its price tag, oh well.
This machine sports a beautiful 17-inch wide-screen display that has a glossy coating and a native resolution of 1,920×1,200. This makes viewing HD movies at full resolution something to look forward too, and multi-tasking becomes a breeze. Nevertheless it’s paired up with a full-size keyboard complete with number pad, with added a row of media control buttons just below the LCD.
Considering its size, it’s not surprising to see this notebook loaded with expansion ports and connectors. It features three USB ports, a FireWire jack, a multiformat memory-card reader, an ExpressCard slot, and VGA and HDMI outputs. There are also microphone and headphone jacks, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam built into the LCD bezel, an external SATA (eSATA) port and a fingerprint reader.
The P-7811FX is the fastest gaming notebook we’ve seen in this price range, making it easy for us to recommend the purchase. We would have liked a Blu-ray drive, but at this price we can’t expect it.
