Lenovo Centrino 2-based ThinkPad X200 Preview

With Intel's recent launch of the Centrino 2 mobile platform, aka Montevina, you can be sure virtually all of the major notebook OEMs have been peddling their wares in an effort to hit the ground running during the back to school season this fall.  First out of the gate, delivering a Montevina thin-and-light to our labs, is Lenovo with their ever-popular, consistently well-built ThinkPad series.  The X200 is here.  All .8 inches thick and just under 3lbs of it...

In typical fashion Lenovo has engineered the X200 with clean, simple lines and a fit and finish second to none, as far as business class notebooks go.  This machine also just sips power, with its 6-cell battery offering over 6 hours of life and a 9-cell upgrade offering over 9 hours according to Lenovo.  Talk about hang time on those long trans-continental flights.  Its screen is a diminutive 12.1 wide aspect panel with a resolution of 1280X800 and of course is illuminated by Intel's 4 Series Express integrated graphics chipset.  The machine is also very quiet though it sports a 2.4GHz Core 2 Du0 P8600 with 1066MHz FSB under its hood.  But where is that touch-pad?  Unfortunately Lenovo left it out in favor red track-point navigation only.

Here's a quick look under the hood, at least via software, to see what she's made of...

Intel's Mobile 45 Express series chipset is duely noted in Device Manager, as well as its integrated graphics core.  One interesting notable is the Intel Turbo Memory Controller listing, tipping us to the fact that this machine can come equipped with a Robson module, otherwise known as Intel Turbo Memory.

Finally, as CPU-Z shows us, the machine is powered by a Core 2 Duo chip of the mobile Penryn variant with 3MB of on chip L2 cache and its 1066MHz FSB.  The X200's system memory is based on 2GB of DDR2 (DDR3-based machines are due out later this year) but our eval unit was setup in single channel mode with a single SO-DIMM. 

More on the new Lenovo ThinkPad X200 in the weeks ahead.  Stick around we have a bushel of notebook coverage coming your way.