So I just jumped from the Asus camp to the Gateway camp...

...And I couldn't be happier. 800$ got me a beauty of a 7811-FX that's been taken care of by a gamer so it came battle tested and scored 9000 in 3dmark06 off the bat (well 8950 but I rounded up ). It has the 1920 resolution screen, 4GB of ram, the 200GB 7200rpm drive with my old 120GB drive as a secondary HD for a total of 320. The 200 is running 64-Vista premium, the 120 is currently running windows 7 but since that is proving to be a waste of my time it's being removed to free up that 17GB and either ubuntu or Xp-pro 32 bit is being put in its place. p8400 processor and 512mb 9800 like everyone else.

A few questions: 1) what utilities and drives are people using to overclock this card? 2) the 2.3ghz processor is getting the boot over the summer, is quad core support from the bios possible by then or should I be looking for a t9 processor (or possibly an x9100 if I get lucky)? and #3) How is this thing pulling 3+ hours on a battery?!?!?!?!?!?!? Seriously, I know my old Asus C90 had battery issues but even so I figured 2ish hours was reasonable, maybe 2.5 hours but I got almost 4 hours when I was at work and then ran up to my college last night.

I've been consistently blown away by how much computer I got for 800$. WoW is maxed out, L4D is almost maxed, Quake Wars is almost maxed and I get 60fps, CoD5 is almost maxed...800$! Bad economy FTW if you can scrape together hard cash to pay for stuff.

Also, I just realized this is my 500th post, yay!

 

1. Atitool works good for me on the 7805u (slightly newer version of the same laptop)
2. quad core support is still a big ?, I'd say at this point its leaning towards "not going to happen" but its tough to be sure (mobile quads use a slightly modified socket with some extra pins for the extra cores stuff, so far no one has had any luck getting a quad to post but there is a quad version the 7808 coming out supposedly) Right now the X9100 is the top CPU, but the BIOS limits the machine to 3 ghz anyways so the T9800 is probably the most "economical" choice since its almost 3 ghz anyways, plus it has a lower TDP than the X9100. A P9600 may be a better choice though as it's a low power chip like the P8400 so you wont take a battery life hit or increase the temps of the machine (which the 7811s have some heat issues anyways)
3. If you aren't loading it heavily it's probably just because it has a HUGE 9 cell battery out of the box

 

I was an asus person myself, they still make great laptops, but I have been looking into getting one of these as well, the price is just unbeatable. Where did you find it for 800 bucks? That is a killer deal, especialy with the 1920x1200 screen.

 

He probably got a tiger direct refurb, they were going for 750 plus ship I believe.

 

Actually it was a local person from classifieds so I didn't have to worry about shipping. Like I said, in these hard economic times being able to pay with cash can get some crazy deals.

And I might look into the p9600 since I am really loving this crazy battery life, especially coming from the C90 where an hour was considered good. Under load on battery I once got 25 minutes when I played WC3. On this beast I was playing wow on med graphics at native resolution and got almost 2 hours of battery before getting the warning.

 

Those tiger direct ones still obtainable?
That price is pretty amazing...

 

If you keep an eye out on slickdeals or tigetdirect's site you may see them again, they always sell out super fast when they show up.

 

Oddly enough Ntune works well to OC the Video card. I previously avoided Ntune like the plague.

 

Welcome to the darkside sauce, I have no regrets about dumping my C90s. I'm happy with my 7811 already have it running RAID 0 and got a BD Rom on the way for it.