R61 and T61 Santa Rosa needs to offer more

Here's an excerpt from the CNET review on the R61:

Our ThinkPad R61 review unit uses the new 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500.which is one click down from the top-of-the-line Santa Rosa CPU. Like the other Santa Rosa systems we've tested, including the Gateway E-475M, the R61 offered excellent performance, but its benchmark test scores were neck-and-neck in most cases with the non-Santa Rosa Lenovo ThinkPad T60p, a long-time laptop favorite. The T60p has a slightly faster, although older, T7600 CPU, showing that the new Centrino Duo platform isn't automatically going to drastically change your computing experience. The R61, however, did widely outperform the older Lenovo T60p on one important benchmark for business users, CNET Labs' Microsoft Office productivity test.

I also question the reasoning of using Santa Rosa with an 800 mhz FSB and pairing it with 667 mhz memory it defeats the purpose. This is exactly the performance I said previously I was expecting from Santa Rosa over the Core 2 Duo, a little better but not by much. Sure there are some notable differences in Santa Rosa over the last offering but most of us have a tendency of looking under the hood and looking at the size of the motor, using a car analogy. Also Intel's Turbo Cache is a two edge sword because it requires Vista, no thanks and you can't configure it if you add the WAN option.

Maybe down the line before the next generation of Intel's chipset we might finally see the refinement of Santa Rosa but it's not there yet and as I thought it's just hype as of right now.

 

Do you find any vendors selling 800mzh notebook RAM?

 

Maybe Mushkin or Corsair but if they are available expect sticker shock. My point still stands though later on Santa Rosa might be worthy but for me the cake came out of the oven a little too early.

 

I think they've really messed up with their battery options...From what I can tell if you upgrade to the 6 cell battery it sticks out of the back an inch. Who wants this laptop with a 4 cell battery? That was a bad decision on their part.

T61 with Nvidia: 6 cell 10.2" depth 3.8 hours
T61 with intel graphics: 4 cell 9.3" depth 3.6 hours
T61 with intel graphics: 6 cell 10.2" depth 5.7 hours
T60 with intel graphics: 6 cell 10" depth 6 hours

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pcinstitute/psref/tabook.pdf

Why didn't they just keep the depth at 10" and add a few extra ports with the extra space? Maybe a DVI port or something that would make this easy to hook up to your T.V...The one thing holding me up from buying a thinkpad is the fact that i can't figure out a solution to hook this laptop up to my HDTV.

 

DVI out is available on the mini dock and the full dock.

 

I shouldn't have to spend $200-$300 extra on a dock when i'm paying $1,600 for a "top of the line" laptop. There should have some port with video out besides the VGA port.

 

Take a look at the business notebook offerings from HP and Dell. Neither of them offer a business class notebook with a built in DVI out.

In fact, up to date, only the 17inch consumer class notebooks have built in HDMI out.

 

T series is "top of the line" business laptops, not multimedia. Most of the customers are companies.

DVI costs space (more inside, then outside) and costs more money.

Where is the new X series?! I can't wait!