Lenovo Announces W700, 17-inch Desktop Killing Notebook

Lenovo, the same company that makes the incredibly thin Thinkpad X200 and X300 (and now small IdeaPad S10), is introducing a 17-inch, 8.3-pound behemoth, the W700, which is sure to make other notebooks quiver in fear, more from its performance than its size. The ultrapowerful workstation, which starts at $2,978 and ships in September, has the kind of horsepower to make even graphic designers, video editors, and CAD users, ditch their desktops. The W700's jaw-dropping features include:

  • Core 2 Extreme Processor, available in Quad Core
  • Dual hard drives, available in RAID or with SSD
  • NVIDIA Quadro FX Mobile Graphics with up to 1GB of video memory.
  • A 17-inch 1920x1200 resolution screen with 72% gamut display
  • On-board color calibrator, calibrates the screen in less three minutes with lid closed.
  • Built-in WACOM Digitizer
  • Up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM

We had a chance to see a W700 in-person two weeks ago when some Lenovo reps stopped by our office for a quick demonstration. While we didn't have quality time alone with this super-charged system, we were blown away by what we saw. Lenovo opened a series of huge, uncompressed RAW images in just a few short seconds and paged through them as easily as if they were small JPEGs. While an 8.3-pound laptop is probably too heavy to lug to Starbucks for an afternoon latte, it's positively puny when compared to the combination of a desktop, monitor, keyboard, and mouse you would have to carry to match its power. You can also leave the Wacom tablet at home, since a stylus pops out of the side of the laptop and a pad is located to the right of the trackpad. Lenovo expects the W700 to be a hit with graphics professionals like photographers who need tons of processing power, super-accurate screens, and gobs of high-speed storage. After all, if you're a wedding photographer who is used to carrying a carload of cameras and lights with you to a job, what's another 8 pounds of notebook?

Avram Piltch
Online Editorial Director
The official Geeks Geek, as his weekly column is titled, Avram Piltch has guided the editorial and production of Laptopmag.com since 2007. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram programmed several of LAPTOP's real-world benchmarks, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. He holds a master's degree in English from NYU.