Our favorite budget gaming laptop returns: The Gateway P7805u FX
Gateway's budget-minded 17-inch gaming laptops have impressed, offering a mix of decent components and high-end video cards for around $1,200. While the now discontinued P-7811 FX is still hunted for on message boards and eBay, Gateway now has a mostly worthy replacement, the P-7805u FX (part of our Winter 2009 Retail Laptop Review Roundup).
Dan Ackerman
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications.
"Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Gateway's budget-minded 17-inch gaming laptops have impressed, offering a mix of decent components and high-end video cards for around $1,200. While the now discontinued P-7811 FX is still hunted for on message boards and eBay, Gateway now has a mostly worthy replacement, the P-7805u FX (part of our Winter 2009 Retail Laptop Review Roundup).
Getting an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GPU and a big 320GB 7200rpm hard drive for only $1,149 is about as good a bang for your buck as you're going to find, but, there were a couple of corners to be cut, notable the 17-inch display's wimpy 1,440x900 resolution.
