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Gateway FHX2300

Michael Brown — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:39:33 -0600

Mirror, mirror on my desk

Gateway’s 23-inch FHX2300 truly is a looking glass: The glossy screen produces extremely distracting glare and specular reflections. Don’t use this monitor if there’s a window or any other strong light source directly behind your seat.

The panel we used for our evaluation had a discolored pixel that glowed green when DisplayMate was producing solid black, gray, or low-intensity cyan and magenta backgrounds; it glowed yellow when the background was solid red. Gateway sent us a replacement unit, but consumers might not be so lucky: The company’s one-year warranty covers dead pixels (meaning pixels that don’t function at all), but it expressly does not cover discolored pixels.

The Gateway FHX2300 did a superb job of rendering skin tones in DisplayMate's high-resolution digital photos.

Once we positioned the Gateway to minimize its glare problems and ignored the discolored pixel on the solid-black background, we noticed significant backlight leakage on the bottom and left-hand sides. Apart from those issues, the FHX2300 delivered solid performance with the rest of our DisplayMate tests, particularly in the areas of grayscale production and screen uniformity. The display delivers six-bit color depth with frame-rate control and five-millisecond response time, so we didn’t encounter any significant motion-blur or other visual artifacts in our game and Blu-ray movie tests.

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Gateway Announces First Touchscreen All-in-Ones with Windows 7

Paul Lilly — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:12:05 -0500

In preparation for the launch of Windows 7 and its multitouch capabilities, Gateway has announced two touchscreen all-in-one PCs built specifically for the upcoming OS.

On the higher end, the Gateway One ZX6810-01 will come with a 23-inch touchscreen display, an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200S, a heaping 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory, a 64GB solid state drive for the OS and 1TB hard drive for storage duties, and ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4670 graphics with 1GB of memory. Cnet, who managed to get its hands on one already, praised the PC for its speed, while noting that the "touch input could be frustratingly unresponsive" at times.

Lower on the all-in-one totem pole sits the Gateway One ZX4800-02. At half the price of its bigger brother, this model boasts a 20-inch touchscreen display, an Intel Pentium dual-core T4300 processor, 4GB of DDR2-800 memory, a 750GB hard drive, and Intel's GMA X4500HD graphics. both PCs ship with 64-bit flavors of Windows 7 Home Premium.

Gateway says the ZX4800 will be available in late October or early November for $750, while the FX6810 will debut sometime in Q4 for $1,400.

Image Credit: Gateway

Gateway to Bring Subsidized LT2016U Netbook to Verizon for $150

Paul Lilly — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:48:38 -0500

You won't get far by shopping for a netbook with just $150 in hand, even if you're willing to browse your favorite online vendor's refurbished section. But for those of you willing to sign up to a 2-year subscription plan through Verizon, $150 suddenly becomes enough to snag a Gateway LT2016u netbook (after $100 mail-in-rebate).

Minus the monthly fee, that's about as cheap as you're going to find a 10.1-inch netbook in the foreseeable future. Other specs include an Intel Atom N270 (1.6GHz) processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive spinning at 5400RPM, built-in webcam and mic, multi-card reader, 3G support, and Windows XP.

Not a bad deal considering the LT2016u retails for $500, but as Engadget rightly points out, shouldn't these subsidized netbooks be free already?

Image Credit: Verizon via Engadget

Gateway P-7808u FX

Katherine Stevenson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:30:41 -0500

A little too much of the same

For several months we’ve been talking about what a great value Gateway’s P-7811 FX gaming notebook was (reviewed October 2008). So we were anxious to see how the update to that model, the P-7808u FX, holds up.

At first glance, “update” seems too strong a word for Gateway’s latest 17-inch performance-oriented notebook. The P-7808u FX looks identical to its predecessor, sporting the exact same black-and-orange chassis as the P-7811 FX, the exact same arrangement of ports— three USB, FireWire, eSATA, HDMI, VGA—and the exact same right-angle power connector that we griped about the first go-round.

The P-7808u FX even features the same videocard, a GeForce 9800M GTS. This card helped last year’s P-7811 FX win us over with impressive scores in our standard gaming benchmarks and the new P-7808u FX’s performance in those tests was equally strong. But compared with a dual-GPU notebook such as CyberPower’s Extreme M1 (May 2009), Gateway’s graphics solution shows its age. When faced with a more graphically intensive title like UT3, the P-7808u FX mustered a score of 64fps compared with the Extreme M1’s 114fps—and it would no doubt fare worse in more modern titles.

The P-7808u FX is identical to last year's P-7811FX, but with a lower-resolution screen.

Where the P-7808u FX most differs from its predecessor is in processing power. The P-7808u FX features a Core 2 Quad; and while it’s 10 percent slower than the P-7811 FX’s Core 2 Duo, it’s the cores that really count in multithreaded apps. In our Premiere Pro, ProShow, and MainConcept benchmarks, for instance, the 2GHz P-7808u FX surpassed its 2.24GHz sibling by 42 to 78 percent. The P-7808u FX also did better than its predecessor in Photoshop, albeit by just four percent.

It’s interesting that Gateway focused its improvements on the applications side and yet went with a lower-res screen for its new P-series model. The drop from 1920x1200 to 1440x900 makes sense for gaming—if this notebook were actually capable of truly demanding games—but for applications work, a higher resolution is generally preferable. Another questionable change was moving from a 7,200rpm hard drive to the 5,400rpm in the P-7808u FX, although we welcome the capacity jump from 200GB to 500GB.

The P-7808u FX’s 9-cell battery maintained a charge for approximately two and a half hours in power-saving mode—enough time to get through most movies, and a pretty good run for a notebook of this size. And as far as big, honking 17-inch notebooks go, the P-7808u FX at least has a slim, and slightly less-cumbersome formfactor.

Nevertheless, we can’t help but feel disappointed. While the P-7811 FX hit just the right mix of price and gaming performance for its time, the P-7808u FX is more expensive than its predecessor, yet offers gamers last year’s tech.

Gateway Turns to Atom for Their Second Netbook

Paul Lilly — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:56:23 -0500

Despite AMD's insistence that it has no interest in pursuing the netbook market, Gateway's first take on the segment resulted in the AMD Athlon Neo-based LT3100, an 11.6-inch netbook chugging along at 1.6GHz. This time around, Gateway takes the traditional route, building its newly introduced LT2000 netbook around the Intel Atom platform.

Sporting a smaller 10.1-inch LED-backlit LCD display, the LT2000 comes equipped with an Intel Atom N270 processor (1.6GHz, 533MHz frontside bus, 512KB L2 cache), 1GB of DDR2-533 memory, two 160GB hard drives, integrated Intel GMA950 graphics, WiFi, built-in webcam, three USB ports, a 3-cell battery, and Windows XP Home with SP3.

Other configurations will also be available in both black or 'Cherry Red.' As spec'd, Gateway lists an MSRP of $300.

Image Credit: Gateway via Engadget

Gateway FX6800

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:00:00 -0500

Who says a gaming PC has to break the bank?

Gateway’s trademark cow is long dead, but that doesn’t mean the company can’t be its quirky old self—something the FX6800 gaming rig illustrates perfectly. With its itsy-bitsy, microATX board, “I don’t care about appearances” wiring, and moderate price, you’d think the box would be easily outclassed by the custom, hand-built PCs we see every month. Well, think again.

The FX6800’s secret is under the hood. While the majority of the machines we’ve tested lately are still running overclocked Core 2 Extreme CPUs, Gateway reached for the midrange Core i7-940. The top-end CPU may be the speed king, but we seriously wondered if a stock-clocked, 2.93GHz Core i7-940 could even hang with those 4GHz Core 2 Extreme rigs.

The results were surprisin. While the FX6800 didn’t clean anyone’s clock, the Core 2 Quad boxes didn’t exactly blow the lowly $3,000 Gateway out of the water, either. For example, the radical, oil-cooled, nearly $11,000, Hardcore Reactor that we reviewed in March was only six percent faster in our Premiere Pro CS3 test and 10 percent faster in Photoshop CS3. Perhaps even more embarrassing is the Reactor’s score in our ProShow Producer and MainConcept tests. Both benchmarks are multithreaded and thus we saw the eight-core (four real, four Hyper-Threaded) FX6800 acing the Reactor by 31 percent in ProShow Producer and achieving near dead-even scores in Main Concept. The performance gap was shocking considering the 1GHz clock gap and massive price difference between the two machines.

In gaming, the FX6800’s single ATI HD Radeon 4870 X2 card couldn’t compete with the competition’s CrossFire and SLI configurations, though. In Crysis, the 4870 X2 saw frame rates in the 34fps range. The tri-SLI Reactor ran in the 53fps range.

Just because the FX6800 comes with only one videocard doesn’t mean the machine can’t run CrossFire. It’s true that you lose two slots going from ATX to microATX, but the board in the FX6800 features two x16 physical slots, so a second X2 card could be mounted. The Delta PSU in the rig even features a harness to support a second graphics card, but we don’t know if it can deliver the needed juice.

There are some other nice touches in the FX6800. The top-mounted media reader features a copy button that automatically copies files to the PC. We like the FX6800’s storage config, which features Intel’s speedy 64GB X-25M SSD drive and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. Not great, but not bad. We particularly like the two additional, easy-to-access drive bays in front. Slide open a door, and you can insert two 3.5-inch SATA drives to act as backup. Further adding to the convenience, Gateway has a backup button that activates Vista’s built-in backup application.

There’s a lot to like about the FX6800. It’s not Kick Ass–worthy, but it’s pretty affordable, and it won’t leave you embarrassed, even if you compare it to last month’s fire-breather. The FX6800 is a little like driving your dad’s AMC AMX against an exotic car in a street race. The other car may be louder and flashier, but it still can’t pull away from your funky ’70s ride.

Gateway Launches AMD-Based Netbook

Paul Lilly — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:45:59 -0500

AMD has repeatedly said it has no intention of releasing a netbook processor and competiting in a market now dominated by Intel and it's Atom platform. Either Gateway didn't get the memo or decided to ignore it, as the Acer-owned OEM this week introduced the Gateway LT3100 netbook with an AMD Athlon 64 L110 processor (1.2GHz, 612KB L2 cache, 800MHz frontside bus) inside.

"The Gateway LT3100 is a smart netbook choice -- it gives customers the freedom to connect to the Internet for everything from staying up-to-date on the latest viral videos and enjoying digital music and photos, to checking on the status of projects and studying for classes," said Ray Sawall, senior product marketing manager for Acer America.

Other goodies include an 11.6-inch LED screen with a 1366x768 resolution, 2GB of DDR2 memory, 250GB hard drive, ATI Radeon X1270 graphics, WiFi, webcam, three USB 2.0 ports, 6-cell battery, and Windows Vista Basic with SP1.

The LT3100, available in black or red, carries an MSRP of $399, however no release date has yet been set.

Image Credit: Gateway via Crunchgear.com

Gateway Reveals 14-Inch High Definition Notebook

Andy Salisbury — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:29:17 -0600

Gateway, following in stride of many others, announced a new notebook this week. Taking examples from both its MC and MD lines of laptops, they’ve revealed the TC series, a line of ultra-thin, HD laptops with cinematic 1,366x768 resolution screens.

These laptops will come with an Intel 2.0GHz Pentium Dual-Core Mobile T4200 processor, 4GB of DDR2, a 320GB HDD and will bring you the visuals, thanks to Intel’s GMA 4500M graphics.

These laptops will cost only $650 a piece, but there’s no word on as to when we can expect them.

Image Credit: Gateway

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Mirror, mirror on my desk

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