Lenovo ThinkPad W700 I

Can't decide between a desktop PC and a laptop? How about a workstation and a laptop? Lenovo's ThinkPad W700 desktop replacement (and desktop-size) laptop incorporates many of the latest mobile workstation features while also packing in a few unusual--and very welcome--goodies for the graphic artist or CAD designer. You can truly pile on the options when configuring the W700, but our test system (normally priced at $3963, but listed at $3295 as of 12/01/2008), while not bare-bones by any means, was relatively modestly equipped, with a 2.8-GHz Core 2 Duo T9600 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate. You can also choose either a 3.06-GHz Core 2 Extreme ($600 extra) or a 2.53-GHz Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300 (a mere $1000 extra). Lenovo says you can pack the W700 with up to 8GB of RAM, though in late November its online configurator only allowed me to specify 4GB. Our test system had two 7200-rpm, 160GB hard drives configured in RAID 0 (striped, for performance); you can specify up to two 5400-rpm, 320GB drives, or two 7200-rpm, 200GB drives. And while our model didn't have it, you can also go for a Blu-Ray Recordable optical drive--but that'll set you back an additional $450. The T9600 CPU yields plenty of oomph, though. In our PC WorldBench 6 tests, the W700 earned a score of 99, which is only a few points shy of the best score we've seen from a laptop. And at a little under 3 hours on a charge, its battery lasted a bit longer than the average desktop replacement notebook we've tested. Because the W700 is a mobile workstation, it comes with mobile workstation graphics--either the nVidia Quadro FX 2700M with 512MB of dedicated graphics memory, or the nVidia Quadro FX 3700M, with 1GB of memory ($400 extra), that came with our test system. That's a ton of graphics memory, especially for a laptop, and it proves useful in applications that can take advantage of it. For example, I installed the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4, which has several GPU-accelerated tools and shortcuts, and the W700 cruised along. And while workstation graphics aren't usually geared for gaming, our test unit performed well compared with other notebooks in this category that we've tested. For example, in Far Cry at 1280-by-1024 resolution with antialiasting enabled, it ran at a blistering 219 frames per second. To put that in perspective, HP's consumer-level HDX18 desktop replacement laptop recently scored 102 in WorldBench, but achieved only 113 frames per second in the same game test.