Lenovo ThinkPad W700 Review, Further Thoughts and Gallery

Is the ThinkPad W700 for you? We take a reality check and give you theThinkPadToday view point.

When Lenovo announced the ThinkPad W700 a couple of weeks ago it caused a frenzy of conversations, forum threads and blog posts.

Rumours had been rife for weeks about the specification of the ‘supposed’ new notebook powerhouse and the conjecture about sightings of the second ‘digi-pad’ were almost biblical in nature!

We presented plenty of evidence on this site about the reality of the new ThinkPadW700 and then blithely shot ourselves in the foot (Again!, We did it with the ThinkPad SL Series back in July) when Lenovo released the W700 4 weeks earlier than expected.

We had a good look at the new ThinkPad W700 last week, but the new Lenovo powerhouse deserves a second look because there’s more to this than just the world’s most powerful ThinkPad (probably the most powerful portable workstation ever?). With full specification the W700 in all probability has enough power tocreate a small worm hole, but at closer look, it goes deeper than that.

It goes deeper because there are several ways to approach the W700 from a configuration point of view.

You see, in base form the new ThinkPad W700 at $2978 is a superbly built, 17”screen ThinkPad, with all the power you will ever need, and it will last you for years because it has all the traditional ThinkPad qualities like metal hinges, the standard setting ThinkPad keyboard, ThinkLight and of course the TrackPoint and UltraNav. It’s just been designed and built to last. And that what ThinkPad’s do best.

With three ways to connect external displays – VGA, Dual Link DVI, andDisplayPort all built into the side, this is a superb multi media and gaming ThinkPad.

And to be perfectly honest, we have wanted a 17” ThinkPad for a while. So much so that from a personal point of view I had considered the IdeaPad Y730 as my own

personal machine! Heresy I know, but when I take of my Editors hat in the evening and the dishes are in the washer, I do like to slay Orc’s and play Warcraft.

At a higher level the ThinkPad W700 becomes an awesome workstation, with an Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme processor QX9300, dual Hard Drives, 4 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM and ThinkPad Blu-ray Recordable Optical Drive you now have a portable workstation that will handle just anything that you can throw at it.

You can configure your choice of two drives as a standalone pair or Raid enabled with either Raid 0 which will combine two disks to give you more space or Raid 1 which will mirror the disks so that precious data isn’t lost if your main drive fails. If you choose Raid, Lenovo will set up and configure the drives for you as a free option.

Now, you’re looking at a price tag of around $4500 for a ThinkPad W700 in this specification but you’re getting power to handle any multimedia or number crunching application with processing power to spare.

Windows Vista experience score is 5.9 for both Business and Gaming graphics and Calculations Per Second hits 5.6. 5.9 is the absolute maximum score possible in anyone category. Is there any other notebook workstation that comes close?

Now take the whole thing up a step further, and go the whole hog, and you have the ultimate photographers, graphic artist and video editors powerhouse. Macbook Pro 17”? Eat your heart out Steve, the ThinkPad W700 is the new King of the Hill as far as photo processing, editing and creative design goes.

ISV Certification (Independent Software Vendor) ensures that the ThinkPad W700 will work with, and has drivers for, your favourite Software Design Suite

You get a wonderful 17? Widescreen 1920×1200 display with 400 nits of brightness which displays 72% of the possible color gamut of the Adobe RGB color space with
the industry’s first integrated color calibration on a notebook.

Lenovo have integrated Pantone’s X-Rite calibrator with HueyPRO software as an option and the whole process is simplicity itself. Calibration is done with the lid closed and you can see the before and after images for visual confirmation. The most important option for most photographers and graphic artists on the W700 however is the WACOM digitizer. The digitizer is superb in Photoshop for defining selections, creating masks, and a lot of other tasks that are virtually impossible with a mouse. The WACOM Digitizer can be mapped at 1:1 to the entire screen real estate, or by using a control applet, can just be mapped it to a selected area.

This really is a photographers dream and adding the Pantone Color Sensor and WACOM Digitizer only puts an extra $150 on your bill so it’s going to be a given for most of you going to this level.

Considering that when we configured the ThinkPad W700 with the Intel® Extreme QX9300 processor, Windows Vista Business 64, 17″ WUXGA 400NIT TFT Display, NVIDIA Quadro FX-3700 Graphics with 1GB, 4 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory, Dual 320GB Hard Drives Integrated Camera and Blu-Ray Drive we hit close to $5600 so it’s not going to be an issue!

Oh, and you’ll need to add the ThinkPad W700 Topload Business case to carry this around in and protect your investment.

Still, shipping is free!

ThinkPad W700 – Conclusion

Whether you want to start with a ‘base’ ThinkPad W700 at just over $2900, if you are ever going to do any photo editing its probably best to add the X-Rite and WACOM option at the offset. At $150, it’s a bargain.

Where you go from there is up to you. You can always ad memory and hard drives later. Do you really need the Quad Core Extreme? That’s really your decision, but if you really do need, or indeed crave, the bleeding edge, then have at it.

What you will get is the ultimate ThinkPad, indeed the ultimate notebook that will deliver awesome creative power and will probably not be surpassed in terms of performance and engineering excellence for a long time to come. Just watch out for those wormholes!

svgallery=w_700