Gateway P-7808u: to Quad or Not to Quad?
by Jarred Walton on April 13, 2009 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Conclusion
We gave the original Gateway P-series FX notebook - the P-6831 - our Gold Editors' Choice award, because it managed to strike the near the ideal balance between price, performance, and features. From what we understand, the notebooks disappeared from retail shelves like hotcakes - very few people were able to find them in stock, and those that did were quite happy. Subsequent notebooks also appear to have sold quite well, from the P-6861 through the P-7811 and P-7801u. Now we have the first quad-core P-series notebook from Gateway; how does it stack up to the previous models?
Unfortunately, while it definitely offers more CPU power, the older notebooks are equal to and sometimes faster in practically every other area. The problem is that the P-7808u costs about $300 more than any of Gateway's previous "affordable gaming" offerings, which moves it out of the realm of affordable and into the upper midrange market. It still offers a very compelling feature set in most areas, but this time it's a case of two steps forward and one step back. CPU performance improves, at least in applications that are properly threaded for a quad-core chip. Hard drive storage capacity is up, and graphics memory increases to 1 GB. Those are all nice improvements, even if some of them are incremental. The LCD on the other hand is a big step backwards from the P-7811. How much that matters to you will definitely depend on how you use your system, but given the price we really can't be happy with that change.
The P-7808u is a good laptop, and if you really want quad-core processing plus mobile gaming without breaking the bank, we recommend it as a viable choice. If you don't need to quad-core processor, however, we have a much better recommendation: check out the P-7805u. We haven't actually tested that laptop... except we have, more or less. The P-7805u has specifications that are very similar to the P-7811, with minor upgrades to the hard drive and GPU but with a downgraded WXGA+ LCD. The kicker is the price: $1150. To put things in perspective, you could buy the P-7805u, a Q9000 CPU, and an extra 500GB 5400RPM hard drive (to go along with the 320GB 7200RPM drive)... and still pay less than the current $1700 price of the P-7808u!
The P-7808u really needs to sell for closer to $1500 for us to recommend it - or give us a better LCD and a two-year warranty and keep the price at $1700. The P-7805u on the other hand is exactly the type of notebook we can recommend, even without officially reviewing it. It uses the same chassis, motherboard, and display as the P-7808u, with a different hard drive and CPU. It should even slightly outperform the 7808u in most games, which is probably an important consideration for anyone looking at this type of notebook in the first place. And if you happen to read this review at a later date and can no longer find the P-7805u or P-7808u, go take a gander at Gateway's site - they probably have a similar but slightly updated model available.
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andrezunido - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
Battery/Technology isn't there yet for "affordable" pc gaming on the move. Is it possible that these lower quality screens have substancial power savings when compared to screens like the Dell's XPS 16, or are they just to save on the moneys?It's nice to see the Apple laptops in the battery charts but since these are almost "consoles" (OS and hardware fine tunned for each other - I think Apple compiles the OS with special optimizations for its hand picked hardware), can they really be compared?
crimson117 - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
Sure they can be compared... hardware manufacturers are allowed to work with MS for driver and OS optimization to make their parts work well with Windows, if they want to.andrezunido - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
...they should have to! Buggy drivers are responsible for lots of power leaks in idle hardware (low power consumption modes in some drivers are non existent). One of the main reasons for this lack of optimization is the big market for PC's and competition between hardware manufacturers to get the hardware out without proper testing, or drivers that don't support proper power saving optimizations. Of course some of this can be blamed on the "generic" nature of the OS (running on various permutations of hardware), making the testing of hardware/software difficult.The Mac OS has the drivers for its limited hardware configurations partially written by the OS maker allowing the fine-tune of the OS for each computer hardware installation.
Like Anand said in a article, its a model/year thing just like a car. The optimization and integration of hardware and software is a well thought thing in a Mac.
In a generic PC the only way that i know of accomplishing this battery efficiency is by building your own Linux installation (i.e. using Gentoo) and tinker with the kernel, drivers and settings to achieve a power efficient installation (see: http://www.lesswatts.org/)">http://www.lesswatts.org/).
Wrapping it up: It can be compared, but... one has to be mindful of what is what.
andrezunido - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
Sorry for the bad link, if anyone is interested in getting a bit more power efficient on Linux, http://www.lesswatts.org/">http://www.lesswatts.org/ has some nice software and information.Anyway, the P-7808u seems like a very capable machine for its price. Too bad about the screen quality, being the first thing I consider on a Laptop (Second is Battery), I find it too bad that it was "downgraded" when everything else seemed to be bumped up (even the price unfortunately).
I guess the battery would have to be a expensive monster to feed this kind of performance machine with a decent autonomy. But the screen would have added a lot a value with "potentially" less investment from the manufacturer.
djc208 - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
I had figured one of these would be top contender for my next laptop but I'm not impressed with this "update". The worst part is that there really isn't a lot of competition for this notebook, even at smaller chassis sizes.I'll just have to hope Gateway or some other company will fill this niche properly by the time I'm ready to buy later this summer.
Thanks for the honest review, hopefully someone at Gateway is listening.
djc208 - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
I had figured one of these would be top contender for my next laptop but I'm not impressed with this "update". The worst part is that there really isn't a lot of competition for this notebook, even at smaller chassis sizes.I'll just have to hope Gateway or some other company will fill this niche properly by the time I'm ready to buy later this summer.
Thanks for the honest review, hopefully someone at Gateway is listening.