Lenovo Intros the Monstrous ThinkPad W700

Engadget recently got their hands on an early delivery of Lenovo's new powerhouse of a laptop, the W700. Aimed at graphic artists and photographers, this beast is designed to really pack a punch. No word on how much for the extra fusion generator to power it for longer than 20 minutes. "Containing enough computational artillery to level a small village, this for-creatives-only behemoth is designed for sheer pixel pushing ... and little else. The system packs in two features aimed at graphic artists and photographers which are fairly unique to a laptop: a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad, and an on-board color calibrator. But what's happening under the hood you ask? Well, for starters the 17-incher sports the first-ever Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU in a laptop (no word on speeds at this point) as well as the first showing of NVIDIA's Quadro FX 3700 graphics chipset (with a hefty 1GB of memory on-board). The workstation also serves up dual hard drive bays configurable as RAID 0 or 1 (SSD or traditional disk, naturally), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an optional Blu-ray burner. Of course, that's fully kitted out -- the W700 starts at $2,978 and moves skyward from there."

Re:Discrimination

[Squapper]

Red button?
I guess you refer to "the clitoris".

Re:No SLI!!!

[clickclickdrone]

What, apart from all those other laptops that have offered SLI for a year or more?

Re:build quality

[Paolone]

No AC, IBM laptops were built by Lenovo for years (after they moved Laptop manufacturing from Greenock, UK) before they sold the home computing division.

Re:Creatives Use Macs

[dyefade]

*Looks around huge creative design agency office with around a 3:1 XP-PC:OSX-Mac split, all running CS3 collaboratively and scratches head.*

Re:build quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. I have a T43 and a relatively new T61... The T61 easily matches the T43 in terms of build quality, and both of them are rock solid compared to my wife's MacBook.

Re:build quality

[Kamokazi]

Are you sure you aren't referring to Lenovo's non-Thinkpad lines (N series, etc)? Those are made of plastic and are not designed much like the Thinkpads at all. The Thinkpad series itself is still a very durable line...I'd put them at the top of the 'standard' laptop scale with regards to ruggedness, the best thing short of a Panasonic Toughbook.

Re:Discrimination

[mrchaotica]

Obviously this [wacom.com] is a figment of my imagination, then.

But seriously, the answer is that it depends on the technology used. The pressure-sensitive screens (as on most PDAs) obviously wouldn't be all that durable, but some technologies (such as the Wacom one) allow the screen to be protected by a glass sheet. Scratching is not a problem because the tip of the stylus is made out of a softer material, so you replace the stylus tip when it wears out instead of replacing the screen.

Incidentally, I own a Thinkpad X60 Tablet that's about a year and a half old now, and wear has not been a problem. And although it does get fingerprints, those aren't a problem either.

Re:Color Calibration

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a color sensor near the trackpad. The calibration happens with the lid closed, so the screen is near the sensor. After about a minute, a recording plays that says you can open the lid.

dom

Re:lefties

[alexandre_ganso]

but I thought lefties were disproportionally represented in the heavily artistic fields.

Not only in heavily artistic fields. Science as well. I certainly see use for a powerhouse like that in the HPC field. Quad superscalar cores and the hundreds of vector units of the nvidia right over my desk at home would do wonders to my research. Oh by the way about lefties, almost half my department is. I'm doing a phd in parallel computing.