Lenovo intros the monstrous ThinkPad W700

[mauricio]

Like your laptops to be over-achievers? Like, the really annoyingly stacked variety of over-achiever? Enter Lenovo's newest outrage -- the ThinkPad W700. Containing enough computational artillery to level a small village, this for-creatives-only behemoth is designed for sheer pixel pushing... and little else. The system packs in two features aimed at graphic artists and photographers which are fairly unique to a laptop: a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad, and an on-board color calibrator. But what's happening under the hood you ask? Well for starters the 17-incher sports the first ever Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU in a laptop (no word on speeds at this point) as well as the first showing of NVIDIA's Quadro FX 3700 graphics chipset (with a hefty 1GB of memory on-board). The workstation also serves up dual hard drive bays configurable as RAID 0 or 1 (SSD or traditional disk, naturally), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an optional Blu-ray burner. Of course, that's fully kitted out -- the W700 starts at $2,978 and moves skyward from there. Take a look at our hands-on below and see the beast for yourself.

via : engadget

[Hardware.Spec]

Lenovo's new powerhouse of a laptop, the W700. Aimed at graphic artists and photographers this beast is designed to really pack a punch. No word on how much for the extra fusion generator to power it for longer than 20 minutes.

[mauricio]

so long for a laptop manufacturer to sidle up with Wacom and include a built-in tablet with their hardware. Back in the day (4 or 5 years ago) I even harassed the Wacom sales people about it while doing demos at their NAB and Siggraph booths, but nothing ever came of it… until now. The Lenovo W700 ThinkPad is a ‘PC Beast’ as the company refers to it, with a 17-inch widescreen display (hopefully 1920×1200) with a built-in color calibrator, NVIDIA Quadro FX mobile graphics card, Intel mobile quad core processor, dual hard drives with RAID configurations, up to 8GB of high speed DDR3 RAM and even an optional Blu-ray DVD burner/player. Very impressive.

Lenovo seems to be targeting the W700 at the professional graphics market, which is why it’s the first to include the aforementioned palm rest mini Wacom tablet. I can’t even use Photoshop without a tablet, and while I’m not sure how effective one this small would actually be, it’s about a million times better than not having one and having to rely on the touch pad or trackpoint nub for pixel pushing. Not surprisingly you’ll be spending about $3,000 for the base configuration of the W700, and depending on RAM or SSD hard drive upgrades, you’ll probably even be spending a lot more than that.