Beastly Lenovo ThinkPad W701, W701ds mobile workstations now shipping

by ThinkPads on April 7, 2010

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.

Click here to configure your ThinkPad W701 or W701ds

Don’t miss the Top 5 Most Expensive W701/W701ds Upgrades

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

none April 7, 2010 at 5:54 pm

Nice ;-) . The main feature I’d want would be the dual screen, since I always want more text editing area, to be able to drag stuff between browser windows etc. The w700ds sold for as little as $1700 or so towards the end, I think; the w701ds (at least now) is 2x that much. I may end up owning one of these things someday (for my purposes the 700 is fine), but not anytime soon for financial reasons.

Lars Gunther April 11, 2010 at 10:35 am

Since I intend to get me one of these and run Linux on it, one would of course wish that it was possible to save some money not paying for Windows. I have no real hope of that happening, though.

none April 12, 2010 at 8:07 pm

The other Linux issue is the damn nvidia graphics which require binary-only drivers.

w7pro May 18, 2010 at 2:03 pm

Your new PC with Windows 7 Professional is loaded with features to help make you more productive. For more information, please visit bit.ly/Win7ProProductivity. To become more familiar with Windows 7 Professional, take a test drive at bit.ly/Win7ProTestDrive

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