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gadget — Episode 093 – The Gateway P-7811FX Gaming Notebook
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The 7811FX is Gateway’s newest entry in their P-Series of high-performance, desktop-replacement, gaming notebooks. It’s the first Gateway notebook to use Intel’s Centrino 2 technology and is based on the P8400, Core 2 Duo CPU with a whopping 3MB of L2 cache, running at 2.26Ghz and sitting on a 1066Mhz bus. The CPU is complemented by 2 sticks of 2GB, Dual Channel, 800Mhz chips for a total of 4GB of DDR3 memory. Gateway has loaded Vista 64-bit Home Premium edition to take advantage of all that extra RAM.
Like all the P-Series notebooks, the Gateway P-7811FX is covered in a glossy graphite-colored shell with rust accents around the keyboard and the sides of the unit.
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The display is a 17″ Widescreen WXGA LCD capable of 1920×1200. It features Ultrabright technology to give the screen a glossy look that boosts contrast levels and brings out rich colors. Like Gateway’s other notebooks, the screen is beautiful. Rich and vibrant with not a hint of uneven lighting or color waver. The screen is powered by the NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS with 512MB of GDDR3 memory. A 1.3 megapixel camera is fixed into the top of the screen’s bezel and the Gateway camera software gives you quick access to video and still image features.
The networking options on the 7811 include a Gigabit Ethernet port, Intel-based a/b/g and Draft-N wireless, as well as a 56k modem for those who are… “broadband challenged.” The left side of the laptop sports a Kensington lock slot next to two stacked USB 2.0 ports. A large heatsink is sandwiched between the ports and an 8X DVD-RW with LabelFlash technology. For those who have never used LabelFlash, it’s a feature included in the optical drive that allows you to print a label directly onto compatible media, meaning that you don’t have to end up with a drawer full of unmarked CDs and DVDs. The back of the 7811 houses the power plug and the modem port. The right side of the notebook has a VGA output, eSATA connector, HDMI port, and the Gigabit Ethernet port. The right side also houses a third USB port, a Firewire connector, jacks for headphones and microphones, as well as a 5-in-1 memory card reader and an Express Card slot. The front of the 7811 has a hardware switch for turning your wireless subsystem on and off, and the release switch for opening the lid of the notebook. The front is finished off by a touchpad and a comfortable wristpad. — One quick note, the engineering sample that I received was equipped with a fingerprint scanner, but the retail 7811FX units are not equipped with them. As in the Gateway T and M series notebooks, the speakers on the P-Series are surprisingly loud and high-quality. They won’t replace your home-entertainment surround sound setup, but they are quite good for a notebook. |
For storage, the 7811FX has a single 200GB 7200rpm SATA drive. However, the eSATA connector is a boon to anybody who plans to use this notebook to do storage-intensive tasks like video editing. The port will allow you to transfer data back and forth over an interface that is 4 to 8 times faster than typical USB 2.0 speeds.
For those for whom an external drive, no matter how quick, is impractical, the 7811 has a second 2.5″ SATA hard drive bay. This means that you can either add to your in-system storage capacity, create a RAID 0 stripped array for truly high-performance data transfers, or a RAID 1 mirrored array for data redundancy.
The keyboard on the 7811FX is a full size unit complete with a separate numeric keypad. The keys are responsive, not cramped, and have a decent throw that gives you good tactile feedback. The keyboard is topped by a row of glowing media buttons, including one that launches Media Center, and Gateway’s signature, touch-sensitive volume control.
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The P-7811FX is powered by a 9-cell Lithium Ion battery rated for 7800mAh. While this would be an enormous amount of power for most any other laptop the 7811 is an unapologetic performance platform. Running the notebook in balanced mode while running High Def video yielded a battery life of more than 2 hours. Dropping into extreme power-saving mode only added 20 minutes to the runtime, while pegging the CPU at 100% and constantly accessing the hard drive killed the battery in an average of 1 hour 20 minutes. — It doesn’t have the legs of, say Gateway’s T-6836 with its 6 hours of battery life, but then again this system has been designed to perform, not to be frugal with power.
The P-7811FX is definitely louder than its predecessors, but it still manages to keep the machine noise down to an acceptable level. A large heat sink on the left side of the of the notebook keeps heat flowing through the chassis, while a heat pipe assembly keeps the CPU and GPU cool with a single, low-noise fan. As for performance, the 7811 is absolutely the top of Gateway’s current line of gaming notebooks. Windows Vista rated the notebook at 5.2, with the memory and graphics subsystems scoring as high at 5.9. Running PCMark Vantage, the P-7811FX topped out at 4480, beating out the older P-171FX by more than 400 points. It cruised through all of PCMarks tests, doing especially well in the gaming benchmarks thanks to the NVIDIA 9800 M GTS. For some real-world testing, we threw Bioshock and Crysis at the 7811. In Bioshock we were able to run the game at 1920×1200 resolution, crank up all the eye candy and still have a smooth gaming experience in a gorgeously rendered environment. Crysis gave the 7811 a bit of pause, but we were still able to run all the eye-candy options at 1024×768 with smooth graphics. We could crank it to 1920×1200, but we had to turn off a few options to get an acceptable framerate. Still, given that Crysis can cause even the most powerful desktops to scream uncle, we were impressed that the 7811 did as well as it did. At the end of our testing we can safely say that the P-7811FX bested its big brother, the P-171XL FX in every important benchmark — especially in one of the most important ones… Price. At half of the original price of the P-171, released just a few months ago, we’re baffled as to how Gateway can sell such a powerful notebook at such a low cost, but with a price-performance ratio like this, we should just say “thank you” and enjoy the power. |
The Gateway P-7811FX comes with a 1-Year warranty and is available for $1400 at your local Best Buy.
