Gateway P-172X FX

Gateway P-172X FX
Gamer delivers fast speeds for low price

POUND FOR POUND, the $1,999 Gateway P-172X FX is one of the best gaming notebook bargains you'll find. It's not the fastest or the cheapest, but its excellent performance-to-price ratio makes it hard to beat.
With its shiny black plastic chassis, orange accents, and faux-carbon-fiber trim, the hefty 9.2-pounds P-172X FX looks virtually identical to its predecessor, the P-171XL FX. Movies are joy to watch on the P-172X FX's 117-inch, 1,920x1,200-resolution wide-screen display, which offers well-saturated colors,crisp text, and good black levels. The system comes with a standard slot-loading DVD burner, though the addition of a Blu-ray burner would have been nice, considering the screen is HD friendly. The notebook's keyboard and touch pad are comfortable to use, though we find it odd that the pad is skewed a bit to the left.
The highest-end option in Gateway's P-Series notebook line, which starts at a low $799, the P-172X fX is not configurable. Fortunately, the company stocks the system with some nice component, including a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo T8300 processor, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and a 512MB nVidia GeFOrce 8800M GTS graphics chip. Those parts added up to impressive performance on our gaming, productivity, and multimedia benchmark tests, especially in light of the notebook's price. Granted, we saw better scores from Alienware's excellent Area-51 m51x, but that system cost over $2,000 more than the P-172X FX.
The system's nine-cell battery lasted 1 hour and 42 minutes on our demanding DVD-rundown test, which is a good score for its class. - S.M.
source: Computer Shopper September 2008.

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