Gateway M680X

If you're ready to ditch your desktop, feast your eyes on this slim widescreen laptop. The Gateway M680X, a very bright 17.1-inch display that employs the high WXGA+ resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels. The M680X's sound system is impressive, too. When playing a DVD movie, the pair of front-mounted speakers offers noticeably fuller sound than what the typical laptop provides. With an insanely fast Pentium M 770 processor at the helm, the M680X had no problem playing DVD movies in perfect detail with flawlessly smooth motion between frames.

Running at 2.13 GHz over a fast 533-MHz system bus and boasting 2GB of integrated cache memory, the Pentium M 770 is flat out the best mobile processor you can buy. Not only is it frugal with its power, but its performance is outstanding. In our real-world testing with Excel, Photoshop, and Windows Media Encoder, the system blew us away. PCMark04 gave it a score of 4,289, which is almost twice the productivity mark we've seen from other recent laptops.

The M680X carries this performance over to its gaming prowess. Rather than rely on an integrated video adaptor, this system features ATI's powerful Mobility Radeon X700 equipped with 128MB of video memory. When we played the GPU crusher Far Cry, the game's graphics were rendered perfectly, and the motion throughout the game was remarkably smooth.

We wondered, though, how much more impressive the system's performance would have been had it featured a full gigabyte of DDR memory instead of the included 512MB.

While we were glad to see that the hard disk offers a massive 100GB of storage capacity, it spins at only 4,200 rpm, which limits data transfer rates and makes applications load a bit slowly. In a high-performance system like this one, we'd like to have seen a 5,400- or 7,200-rpm drive.

On the other hand, this hard drive's slow speed has two positive effects on the M680X. First, the system is silent, even when it's running full-bore in a 3D game. Also, combined with the power-saving Pentium M, the hard drive helps the system overcome some of the high energy consumption of the 17-inch screen and the Mobility Radeon X700. The result is a serviceable battery runtime of 2 hours and 34 minutes in our DVD playback test with all power management disabled.

This runtime was unaffected by whether the Wi-Fi adaptor was on or off. This isn't your typical Wi-Fi adaptor, either. In addition to accessing both 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networks, it can connect to 802.11a networks, which are used in many offices.

When you need to get some work done on this laptop, you're sure to appreciate its comfortable full-sized keyboard. Not only is the M680X's chassis wide enough to accommodate extra-wide Tab, Shift, Backspace, and Enter keys, but it houses a separate numeric keypad.

Rounding out the M680X's impressive list of features is a double-layer DVD burner, a FireWire port, four USB 2.0 ports, and an SD/MMC/Memory Stick reader.

Although the system is a bit of an investment at $2,435, it's well worth the cost, providing all the performance and features that a desktop replacement buyer could want while yielding respectable endurance for road warriors. If you spend the extra $169 to upgrade to the optional three-year warranty, the Gateway M680X is an outstanding package.