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A 17″ Widescreen WXGA LCD dominates the face of the 7801u. With a native resolution of 1920×1200 and a ultrabright coating to enhance contrast and color, this display is gorgeous.
I didn’t see any brightness blooms or color blotching and the contrast was uniform across the screen. The LCD is backed up by an NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS with 1GB of discrete GDDR3 memory. The bezel is topped off by a 1.3 Megapixel camera for video and stills.

Ports abound on the 7801u. There is a Kensington lock port at the rear-left of the 7801u to secure your notebook in high-risk areas. The left side also sports two stacked USB 2.0 ports, the heatsink vent, and the 8X DVD-RW.

The back of the 7801u houses the power plug, the modem port and the sizeable battery hump.

The right side of the notebook holds the VGA port, HDMI 1.3 output, eSATA connector, gigabit Ethernet, a third USB port, firewire connector, audio jacks and the 5-in-1 memory card reader.

The front of the 7801u has a hardware switch for the wireless networking as well as a release button for the lid.

Like the other notebooks in the P-Series line, the 7801u has two bays for 2.5” SATA-II drives. Gateway includes a single 320GB 7200rpm SATA drive, but they also give you the caddy for adding a second internal drive. You can use this second drive to simply add storage to your system or, if you desire truly insane transfer rates, you can run the 7801u in RAID 0, striping the drives and boosting transfer rates by up to 70%. For those who want even more storage, for example – if you plan on using the 7801u for video editing, the eSATA connector gives you the option of having a super-high-speed link to massive amounts of external storage.

Built on Intel’s power efficient Centrino 2 technology and powered by a 2.26Ghz Intel P8400, Core 2 Duo CPU sitting on a 1066Mhz bus, the P7801u is loaded with 2 sticks of 2GB DDR3 1066 memory for a total of 4GB to run Vista 64-bit Home Premium.

Networking the P7801u is easy thanks to the integrated Gigabit Ethernet and the Intel WiFi Link 5100 802.11a/b/g and Draft-N wireless card.

While desktop replacements are designed to run plugged in, that’s not to say that the 7801u can’t be used on the go. Portable power for the P-7801u comes from a 9-cell, 86.68 Watt-Hour Lithium Ion battery that can run the performance machine for a surprisingly long time.

When we ran the 7801u in balanced mode while simulating typical web surfing, video watching and light editing, the battery lasted almost 3 hours. We were able to get almost 4 hours by turning off the wireless, dropping screen brightness and limiting the CPU to 50% of maximum.

Even when I switched the notebook into performance mode with WiFi enabled, the screen at full brightness while pegging the CPU with video rendering we were able to eek out 1-1/2 hours of continuous work time. That’s quite impressive considering the amount of computing horsepower that comes with the 7801u. I don’t know exactly what Gateway has changed, but it’s obvious that they’ve changed a few things between the 7801u and the 7811FX, because this model spanks the 7811 in all battery metrics.

A note about sound: Gateway received a few complaints about the noise level of the 7811FX, so they retooled for the 7801u, and their work is definitely noticeable. When I had the laptop set for power saving mode I didn’t hear ANY fan noise. In balanced or performance mode, the fan was audible, but not annoyingly so.

In benchmarks the 7801u topped even the Gateway 7811 for pure performance. In PCMark Vantage we were able to hit 4618 vs. the typical 4261 of the 7811. In 3DMark we topped out at 4267.

For some real-world testing, we threw Bioshock, Crysis and FEAR 2 at the 7801u. In all cases, we cranked up the eye candy and the framerates were still fantastic.

The Gateway P-7801u FX comes with a 1-Year warranty and is available for ~$1200 at your local Best Buy or from NewEgg.