Digital Trends

Gateway P-171XL FX Edition

January 14th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

When we first pulled the P-171 out of the box we were immediately impressed with how sleek and shiny it is. The faux carbon fiber look is pretty neat too, though we’re not too hot about the burnt-orange highlights. However, the whole package looks elegant and we like it.

First boot

We plugged in the large power brick and fired it up for the first time. It booted to Windows and we took a look around. First we looked at the Windows Vista Experience Index, and were surprised to see it listed as 5.0. This is the highest score we’ve ever seen for a notebook, and almost rivals our very own desktop!

Then we got a little annoyed, because the Norton Internet Security window kept popping up and asking us to install the program, which we would not (we’ve stated before we don’t like this program). We were also bothered by the flashing BigFix icon in the system tray. We’ve reviewed numerous programs before and hate how this program is always trying to install “fixlets.” We also didn’t like the desktop links to AOL and eBay, as those types of links have no place on a gaming machine.

Navigating around Windows the system was incredibly fast and responsive. Given the speed of its processor and the fact that it has 3GB of DDR2 RAM, this was not surprising. It’s a true desktop replacement in terms of speed and feel.

Crysis Game Testing

Since this is a gaming laptop, we then immediately installed Crysis. Since this game barely ran on our burly home rig, we were curious to see how it would fare on a notebook. To our surprise, it actually ran quite well, albeit at 1024x768 resolution. Still, we were able to turn everything up to “High,” and it looked decent despite some aliasing. We let the game run for hours and never had any issues with overheating either. The fans were definitely audible though, but not as loud as those on the Alienware M9750 we recently reviewed. To be fair to Alienware though, its m9750 had two GPUs whereas the Gateway has just a single GPU.

Basic functions

From there we checked out the rest of the notebook. It includes a 1.3MP webcam that is built into the LCD. It takes decent resolution movies, but it’s nothing to write home about. The camera’s software launches via a taskbar that "auto-hides" on the left-side of the screen.

The included biometric fingerprint scanner worked flawlessly too, allowing us to register our fingers then use them to log-into Windows. It’d be nice if we could use our fingerprint to log into our favorite websites too, but as it stands it provides a good level of security in case of theft.

Battery Life

As we’ve stated before, these hardcore gaming notebooks usually have terrible battery life due to their power consumption, but we are actually impressed with the P-171’s. With its dual-core CPU under full load it ran for 59 minutes, which is decent. We then tested it just watching a movie, and the battery lasted an impressive 1:41, which is just enough time to catch a movie on a flight.

HD DVD Output

As we noted before, the P-171’s inclusion of an HDMI port is interesting, as it allows you to use the HD DVD drive in the unit to play HD movies on your TV. Though we didn’t specifically test this due to the lack of an HDMI cable, it is certainly a cool feature and one we’d expect to see on a truly next-gen notebook such as this. And speaking of outputs, it’s odd that Gateway chose to put a VGA port on it rather than DVI.

Temps

Since these types of notebooks have hot-running hardware, and very little space to cool them, it’s typical to see nuclear temperatures on these big boys. The P-171 got hot alright, but didn’t overheat and the fans were only noticeable when gaming. The GPU got up to 83C under load and the CPU reached 67C. Both temps are high but nothing to worry about.

Overclocking

Any processor made by Intel that carries the Extreme moniker has an unlocked multiplier, so overclocking is much easier since you can just up the multiplier without having to fuss with front side bus speeds. On the P-171, you can overclock the processor from 2.8GHz to 3.0GHz in the BIOS by toggling the CPU speed value. We tested the P-171 at its 3.0GHz speed and never had any issues or problems. While some might scoff at the paltry 200MHz overclock, we agree it’s not much of a boost but it’s free and so easy to do that it’s a nice little bonus.

Gateway lets you overclock the processor from 2.8GHz to 3GHz by changing this BIOS value.

Conclusion

We were impressed with the Alienware M9750, but we’re even more impressed that the P-171 has all-around better hardware, and costs $1,500 less. It’s truly a remarkable achievement to offer this much power at a reasonable price point. Even better, Gateway is also offering two other FX notebook models with slightly lower specs for $2K and $1600, which is crazy affordable for a gaming notebook. Though we don’t like the lame trialware Gateway includes with the notebook it’s nothing 30 minutes of cleanup won’t fix. And we’d also like to see a DVI-out port instead of the legacy VGA port, though the inclusion of an HDMI connector is a nice touch.


Pros:

• Very responsive and fast
• Great for gaming
• Decent battery life
• Semi-affordable

Cons:

• Pre-installed trialware is useless
• No DVI-out