Hard-core gaming laptops were once thought of as sticker-shock items, but they've changed sharply of late in both looks and price. In their new incarnation, they're acting as big-screen media centers and desktop replacements, now that prices for the fastest parts have plummeted to a level that makes them affordable to the masses. At $1,800 (street), the Gateway P-7808u is aggressively priced for a gaming rig, with a mobile Intel quad-core processor and a powerful Nvidia graphics card built into a light 17-inch platform. Though its looks could use a huge splash of imagination, this hard-core gaming laptop is a terrific deal no matter how you look at it.
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From the outside, you wouldn't be able to tell that the P-7808u is marketed as a gaming laptop. Its design, exactly the same as that of last year's P-171XL FX, is as bland and generic as that of some of the cheap desktop-replacement laptops. The only hint at its true nature is a big "FX" logo denoting Gateway's mobile gaming line. The glossy top and the copper-colored accents simply aren't as cutting edge as those of the LED-studded Dell XPS M1730 (Penryn) and ASUS G71G-Q1. Its minimalist design has advantages, though. The 8.9-pound frame is the lightest so far for a 17-inch gaming laptop, compared with the Alienware M17 (9.4 pounds), the CyberPower Gamer Xtreme M1 (9.6 pounds), and the Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q725 (9.2 pounds). To find even lighter alternative you would have to settle for a smaller screen, like the one found on the 15-inch MSI GT627-218US (6.1 pounds).
Design wasn't the only aspect of this laptop to suffer from the cost cutting needed to achieve its price. While the 17-inch widescreen offers plenty of real estate for multitaskers and gamers, the 1,440-by-900 resolution isn't as grand as the 1,920-by-1,200 ones found in the Alienware M17, the ASUS G71-Q1, and the CyberPower M1. And although the full-size keyboard and adjacent numeric keypad were pleasantly responsive, they aren't illuminated like the ones found in the M1 and the M17. Since gamers often play in low-light environments, an LED-backlit keyboard would have been a persuasive selling point.
The feature set is as solid as that of any high-end gaming laptop. It's one of the few Gateway-branded laptops that come with a FireWire port. The three USB ports and a separate eSATA port will support assorted peripherals. The included HDMI port, which lets you stream content to a bigger display, is becoming a standard on media laptops. And while the Alienware M17 and the CyberPower M1 chose to bolster speeds with a fast, 7,200-rpm hard drive, the P-7808u opted for capacity: Its slower, 5,400-rpm drive has twice the capacity of its rivals—500GB. By contrast, the ASUS G71G-Q1 and the Toshiba X305-Q725 support dual hard drives that offer attractive capacities without skimping on rotational speed. For an optical drive, a dual-layer DVD burner is your only option; the G71G-Q1 trumps it by supplying a Blu-ray reader (standard), and the M17 and M1 offer Blu-ray (read-only) drives as optional extras ranging from $200 to $400. The M17 and M1 offer optional Blu-ray drives, which range from $200 to $400. As with all Gateway laptops, a one-year parts-and-labor warranty is included with your purchase.
The money that Gateway saved on the P-7808u's design and screen resolution went into bolstering performance. The P-7808u is one of only a handful of quad-core gaming laptops on the market right now. Others include the ASUS G71G-Q1 and the Toshiba X305-Q725, which use the same 2.0-GHz, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor as the P-7808u. Out of the three, the Gateway is easily the most inexpensive. Also helped by its 4GB of DDR3 memory, it breezed past the dual-core Alienware M17 and CyberPower M1, specifically on processor-intensive tests like PCMark Vantage 07, CineBench R10, and video encoding. Since Photoshop CS4 is a memory-intensive test, the G71G-Q1 had a 3-second edge, thanks to its 6GB of DDR2 memory.
A gaming laptop's reputation is upheld not only by its processor but by its graphics card as well. The Nvidia GeForce 9800M GTS in the P-7808u is not the most powerful solution available, but it delivered 3DMark06 scores comparable with those of the Toshiba X305-Q725, whose graphics card is a grade higher. Systems with dual graphics cards (ATI Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire), like those in the Alienware M17 and CyberPower M1, were the most impressive on 3DMark06 tests. Overall, the P-7808u had its share of wins in the gaming department and can tackle any 3D game with ease, but the M17 and the M1 were better 3D performers. Their 3DMark scores were the highest, reaching the 11,000 point plateau (ran at 1,024-by-768 resolution).
Despite the energy-consuming parts, the P-7808u managed to do quite well on battery tests. Its 81-Wh battery outlasted the competition, scoring 3 hours 29 minutes on MobileMark 2007, whereas all the other gaming laptops mentioned in this review fell well short of that mark.
The Gateway P-7808u is by far the most inexpensive gaming laptop to house a quad-core processor and a fast gaming card. Gateway had to skimp on design and screen resolution to achieve this price, but the P-7808u delivers on the most important aspects of gaming, including the thing that hard-core gamers care about most: graphics performance.
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