Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds Review
You’d think that the most powerful notebook on the market would go to Apple. But sadly (for Apple that is) Lenovo has had that crown in their hands for some time. The ThinkPad W700 is the best of the best when it comes to performance and as to be expected it is the best of the best in price.
But if you fall into the category that has thousands to waste on a notebook that you will probably never exhaust or you’re the traveling 3D graphics professional who finds himself on the road too often than you might want to check out the W700ds which is an update to the original W700 and the quad core version.
DESIGN
There is no doubt that you can find the same features of the ThinkPad W700ds elsewhere for hundreds less. But the reason why this system is marketable is its portability. Granted the every day user and even most people who work in the graphical or entertainment industry will never find use for most of the features on the system, yet there will still be niche that will be thankful for such a system.
Those will most likely include film makers, photographers and of course 3D graphical professionals.
The system is pretty heavy and weighs an astounding 11 pounds. But all that weight is not for anything and it sports some spectacular features. The system is built on a 2.53-GHz Core 2 Quad Core Extreme QX9300 design that comes with 4GB DDR3 RAM that is upgradable to 8GB. The native resolution is 1920×1200 via a 17-inch screen and graphics card options include the Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M with 1GB of DDR3 memory. WiFi includes 802.11a/g/n as well as Bluetooth 2.0. There are an astounding 5 USB ports on the system as well as a 7-in-1 card reader as well as ExpressCard.
All of this fits inside a system that is 2.1 inches thick. But the major reason why the system was upgraded was to include a WACOM pad that utilizes an additional screen that slides out from behind the system (hence the ds in the notebooks name standing for dual screen).
PERFORMANCE
Competition was a no show when it came to performance. The W700ds totally trumped the competition and was only beaten by its older brother the quad-core W700. That said most of the performance marks doubled that of most desktop replacements.
As for gaming though the W700ds was still unable to beat the powerhouse of the Alienware Area-51 m17x although it did beat it out in the DirectX 10 tests. But that is not to say that the system fails at graphical performance because it is more than capable at doing this as out Far Cry, F.E.A.R, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 tests showed.
In terms of battery life though the numbers were expected to be low and we were right. The systems 9-cell battery was only able to muster an hour and 45 minutes out of a single charge so you might not want to open one of these op on the plane (not taking into consideration the weight).
CONCLUSION
The W700ds is a monster at performance. We give it a solid 10 for the performance to price ratio. But if you are interested in a system like this be willing to spend in excess of $5,000 which was the region for our test system.
