Gateway P-7811 FX: We've Got Upgrades

False Start or Judging Error?

We've had a lot of good things to say about the P-7811, and on paper there's plenty to like. Clearly performance is also good, and for the price there simply aren't any other laptops that can seriously compete right now. What the previous pages haven't told you is that we did have some difficulty with our test laptop, specifically in regards to stability and graphics drivers.

Two of our gaming tests could not be run on the driver that initially shipped with the laptop because of display corruption. Company of Heroes DX10 and the Devil May Cry 4 benchmark (again DX10 mode only) both had completely corrupted colors. Performance in some other titles wasn't quite where we would expect it to be. Even now, we're still not entirely sure about performance in some of the games - are the games GPU bandwidth limited, or is it simply a case of the drivers not being fully optimized yet? Unfortunately, driver difficulties are something you have to deal with on pretty much every gaming laptop out there, and the Gateway P-7811 certainly isn't any worse than the competition.

Complaints about graphics drivers are nothing new, but the stability problems are much more troubling. We continued to have sporadic lockups throughout testing, but tracing down the cause of the lockups is difficult. You see, Gateway provided us with a beta graphics driver to fix our display corruption issues, but beta drivers could also create stability problems. We had the system crash during a gaming test, during the DVD playback battery life test, and once or twice while it was just sitting idle in between testing. (Note that the lockups were not a frequent occurrence; we encountered perhaps five or six during several weeks of testing.)

Besides the beta graphics drivers, there's another potential cause for the lockups. We are testing prerelease hardware, and despite similarities to previous P-series FX notebooks we are dealing with a new motherboard, chipset, and processor. We definitely got the impression that Centrino 2 wasn't entirely ready for prime time at the official launch last month, so the instability we experienced might be related to that. It's entirely possible - even likely - that Gateway just needs to finish a bit of BIOS tuning. We also noticed that the exhaust port for the GPU tended to get hotter than on other FX notebooks, and the fans never seemed to run at maximum speed. Higher temperatures certainly could have contributed to the lockups during gaming, and a minor tweak to address cooling concerns could easily fix the problems.

Given the above concerns, we are not ready to declare the P-7811 an unequivocal success, but we are still very optimistic. We only encountered a few problems during our couple weeks of testing, and for early hardware we're willing to give Gateway the benefit of the doubt. If you're not willing to take a chance - even a small one - you might want to hold off a bit. Then again, if you hold off too long you may find that the P-7811 is no longer in stock, or even in production. All of the upgrades that Gateway provides compared to the earlier P-6831 provide an exceptional value for users looking for a new gaming notebook. Our only other request for Gateway is that the next time they look to revise their gaming laptop lineup, they need to rework the chassis slightly and get rid of the protruding battery. We would be a lot happier with a slightly thicker notebook that can fit in standard 17" laptop bags.

We can't say with a straight face that anyone actually needs a gaming notebook, but if you're in the market and you don't want to break the bank the P-7811 is our current pick for best overall value. If you can't find it in stock, check the Gateway website and TigerDirect for some other options. You might need to spend a bit more money, or a bit less money as well in some cases, but either way Gateway's P-series FX notebooks have a lot of very attractively priced options for mobile gamers.

We are still at work on our laptop roundups, which should hopefully be posted within the next week. In addition to providing the additional testing and results from Gateway's P-7811, we will also provide any updated information about stability and/or BIOS updates.

Update: As mentioned in our Gaming Laptop Roundup, updating the graphics drivers to the hacked 177.92 Vista 64-bit drivers at LaptopVideo2Go.com seems to have cleared up the stability concerns with the P-7811. While the P-6831 FX received a Gold Editors' Choice upon release, the bar has since been raised. The P-7811 makes a lot of meaningful upgrades to the P-6831, but given it uses the Centrino 2 platform, the lack of Hybrid Power as a feature (and the bulky chassis) is no longer something we can wholeheartedly recommend. The price/performance offered is way ahead of the competition, however, so if you don't mind the design or missing features we have no other remaining reservations.