source – thinkpads.com/ by John Hobbes
Lenovo’s been busy adding new models for sale lately, and today brings us the monstrous ThinkPad W701 and W701ds mobile workstations. These 17-inch uber-ThinkPads start $2599 for the “plain jane” W701 or $3299 for the transforming W701ds dual screen model. Announced back in January at CES 2010, they are finally available for purchase today!
All W701 configurations come standard with quad core Core i7 processors, NVIDIA Quadro FX 2800M 1GB graphics, 2GB RAM, DVD burner and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Unfortunately the plain 45% color gamut WXGA+ LCD is standard, but the must-have WUXGA 100% color gamut, RGB LED backlit display is only $175 extra. While the $3299 starting price for the W701ds may seem high, it includes the upgraded display out of the box, helping take a bit of the edge off that sticker shock.
For those who need serious graphics horsepower, the juicy NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M 128-core card takes an extra $470 out of your pocket, or nearly 20% of the base price of the W701! The integrated color calibrator and digitizer panel built into the palm rest are a more reasonable $150 option.
Internal RAID is a no-cost configuration, you just have to pay for the cost of the additional hard drive and they will configure it to run right out of the box. Those with deep pockets can get dual 128GB SSDs in a RAID configuration for $790!
Finally, photographers will appreciate the $10 option that trades the 54mm ExpressCard slot for a CompactFlash slot that transfers data through the PCIe bus. This should provide decent performance, unlike the first generation solution implemented on early W700 models.
If you want to check out some more detailed specs on the W701 and W701ds, hit up Lenovo’s PSREF page and download the latest “ThinkPad Notebooks” PDF.