Lenovo's ThinkPad W701ds Supplies Massive Performance

If Paul Bunyan were a geotechnical engineer, the Lenovo ThinkPad W701ds would be his Babe. It's hardly fitting to call this massive laptop a desktop replacement; it's a workstation alternative, able to take your most demanding applications anywhere. In addition to ridiculously fast performance, this laptop offers a built-in Wacom drawing tablet, a color-calibration tool, and even a second LCD. If you crunch real-time data on oil rigs or if you design jet engines while flying over the Atlantic, this could be your new PC. Anybody desiring one of the fastest, most tricked-out, and most costly portables around will find a great sidekick here.

This ISV (independent software vendor)-certified laptop crushes every application it encounters. In tests with professional-level content-creation tools, including 3D Studio Max 2011, Painter 11, and Avid Media Composer, all of the programs ran smoothly. Demanding games can also bring down lesser laptops--but while gamers may not be this laptop's target market, on this machine Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Crysis Warhead, and Supreme Commander 2 all looked great at high resolutions and maximum settings.

The ThinkPad W701ds rocked in PCWorld's quantitative benchmarks, earning a WorldBench 6 score of 123 and an overall mark of 96 out of 100 in our total performance test, among the highest scores yet. An Intel Core i7 X920 running at 2GHz powers this laptop, backed up by 8GB of RAM. The laptop even has an nVidia Quadro FX 3800M graphics card packing 1GB of VRAM. To say this system is loaded would be an understatement--it's a full-on arsenal.