M680X Price Check?

Sounds good to me. Go for it.

You can probably do better. I would recommend contacting Otto at Gateway. He's gotten several people on this forum a great deal and is pleasant to deal with. I think you might have better luck calling instead of talking through chat as well. Good luck.

Otto Taylor
1-800-846-2036 x56411
Otto.Taylor@Gateway.com

Gateway M680X:
17' WXGA w/ Ultrabright display
centrino 1.73ghz processor
1 gig ram (2 512 modules)
128mb radeon x700
60gig 7200 rpm harddrive
8x dual layer dvd-rw
3yr warranty *no on-site*

Final Price w/ tax and shipping: $1,726.92

Well..my friend's dad is a consultant for gateway. I gave em the quote number and he contacted his guy on the inside for the purchase. I was then given a direct number to his office and I basically called and he worked out the price for me. It wasn a "huge" discount so I wouldnt go as far as to say you can't get this kind of a price without a little effort.

Ive seen some of the other deals people have gotten on these boards and the deal I got wasnt extraordinary by any means. My advice to you would be to make your custom configuration on the website, save the quote, then call this Otto guy and see what he can do for ya on the price.

Also..I know this works with Dell and Apple, but have not tried with gateway. If you tell them your an educator you get 10% off of your purchase. Its not something they check up on or anything either. Good luck with your notebook dude...my package just arrived at home where it is sitting safely on my bed. I can't wait to get back into town tomorrow night and open it up.

welll..Ive gotten to sit down behind my M680 for a couple of days now. You asked, so Ill give my impressions. My configuration is listed a couple of posts above. For starters, let me say that this is an amazing notebook..it boots up and shuts down very fast. There is some serious speed here guys.

The display is great. Vivid, bright, and just extraordinarily sleek. There was some minor light leakage at first that wasnt even a noticable issue anyway, but I will note that it did fade after the first 48hrs of use. Even if it hadn't..there would be something wrong with you to complain about it anyway. In fact, if I hadnt have seen some people here bitch about it...I would never have noticed. So I will just say that the display is brilliant.

Now to the part I am sure a lot of people want to know about..gaming. All I can really say about this one is...... The only thing I tried so far was World of Warcraft. In 1440x900 wide screen resolution, max texture detail, max environment effects, all shaders except for full screen glow, and everything else at default.... 59.3fps locked when plugged in. 35-50fps when running on battery. To give you a comparison..my desktop pulled about 20fps with minimum settings. So this thing can game...do not let anybody tell you differently.

An issue I have read about many times on this board were with a certain buzzing sound when headphones are plugged in. The issue must've been addressed by gateway because I don't hear any such thing at all. The audio in general sounds very robust and clear...I was impressed.

The dvd drive seems to be fine, although I have also heard bad things about it on these boards. Both my friend and I have recently purchased M680s and any DVD either of us have churned out has been perfect

There is one issue I would like to cover here as both my friea\nd and I have encountered it. For some reason the wireless gets a very weak signal from the router out of the box. If it connects at all, it will give you a slow connection. If you run into this problem..I will recommend downloading the intel wireless drivers as doing so clears up the problem and I also find Intel's utility to be "cleaner" than microsofts. Since switching to the intel drivers..my wireless has worked perfectly.

That should cover everything I wanted to address to you in this post. All-in-all, this is the finest notebook I have run on. Its not light, but not exceedingly heavy either. The battery life seems pretty decent too. If your looking for a notebook that your not going to carry with you every waking moment...then this is something for you. I am thrilled with it so far.