14 DAY TRIAL // Gateway has shown the world its latest P-series FX notebooks at CES with immediate availability within the United States. The new series of notebooks is designed for various tasks, such as gaming, digital media, and other advanced applications.
The notebooks are built around the Intel Centrino technology and Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Extreme processors. All the notebooks come with Nvidia's GeForce 8800M GTS 512MB GDDR3 dedicated graphics solution with HDMI and eSATA ports.
The most interesting model in the series is Gateway's entry-level notebook, the Gateway P-6831FX. It is priced at $1350 and comes with a 17-inch LCD display to support 1440x900 WXGA+ resolution, an Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 (1.66GHz, 2MB shared L2 cache), 3GB of RAM, a 250GB 5,400 RPM hard drive and a multi-format dual-layer DVD-R/RW/DVD-RAM drive.
Although its technical specifications are not that impressive, the $1350 price tag qualifies it as "best buy", given the fact that it is a 3 GB, 17-inched notebook, still. It is true that the notebook prices are continually dropping as the technology is becoming mainstream, but the Gateway price policy seems to be backed up by mother-company Acer to protect its North American market.
The top model in the series is the P-171XL FX edition. It also comes with Nvidia's GeForce 8800M GTS 512MB GDDR3 video card, but it adds the power of the Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 processor, as well as 400GB of storage on two 200GB 7200RPM SATA hard drives. Moreover, it comes with a HD-DVD player, but its $2,999 price is more than double as compared to the lowest notebook in the series.
The Gateway P-Series is already available through the company's online retailers' network. The BestBuy retails stores will start selling it as of January the 13th. All the notebooks in the series ship with the pre-installed version of the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system.