Gateway FX7020 and FHD2400 Review

It's been years since $1,100 was a low budget for retail desktop shoppers. We remember spending that much in January 2007 to get a dual-core (Athlon 64 X2) Media Center PC with a TV tuner and all the trimmings, including a 250GB hard disk, DVD burner, and not-too-bad Nvidia integrated graphics. The only real shortcoming was its 1GB of RAM, which at the time we innocently thought would be enough for Windows Vista.

It takes a lot more to stand out on the Best Buy or Circuit City shelves today. That's why Gateway presents its FX7020 as an alternative to formidably powerful, formidably priced Dell XPS or HP Blackbird or Alienware systems -- in other words, an affordable gaming PC. It's not going to set DirectX 10 speed records or dominate LAN parties, but it can play current titles without clutching its chest and falling to the floor.

Besides a ready-for-Halloween black and orange color scheme, the $1,100 Gateway features AMD's quad-core Phenom 9600, a 2.3GHz processor with 512K per core of Level 2 cache plus 2MB of shared Level 3 cache. It comes with 3GB of DDR-2/667 memory -- almost all that the preinstalled 32-bit Vista Home Premium can handle -- and a hefty 500GB hard disk.

There's also a DVD±RW drive; Media Center capability via an analog/digital TV tuner with remote control; and a discrete PCI Express x16 graphics card: Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT, one of the hottest (popularity, not Celsius) cards on the market today for its exceptional balance of price and DirectX 10 performance.

To be sure, you won't find a second PCIe x16 slot on the motherboard for a dual-card SLI setup. And you're likely to bump your head against the ceiling of the Gateway's 400-watt power supply when planning upgrades.

But with the help of the 8800 GT's 112 stream processors and 256-bit interface to 512MB of memory, the Gateway racked up a capable Futuremark 3DMark06 score of 6,782 at a challenging 1,920 by 1,200 resolution with 4x antialiasing. Its score at 1,024 by 768 with no antialising was 9,348. And in Gun Metal 2, one of the toughest DirectX 9 tests around, we saw 50 frames per second at 1,600 by 1,200 with 4xAA.

Portable Media What?

The FX7020's familiar midtower form factor makes room for two front-accessible 5.25-inch drive bays, one labeled "Expansion" and the other holding the Optiarc (Sony/NEC) DVD±RW drive, which adds Labelflash technology -- HP's LightScribe's rival in the business of burning labels directly onto specially formatted media -- to the usual SuperMulti set of storage formats. Considering the PC's Media Center credentials, we would have liked to see a BD-ROM drive for watching Blu-ray movies, but that would snatch the system price out of Gateway's target (or Target) consumers' reach.

Below the 5.25-inch bays is a sliding door that reveals microphone and headphone jacks, video and left and right audio inputs, and a bay for Gateway's Portable Media Drive -- a USB-plugged, swappable hard disk for backing up or storing and transporting 120GB of data, offered with several Gateway desktops over the past few years.

We would have liked the feature better if we could find a Portable Media Drive for sale anywhere on Gateway's Web site -- the closest we came was a link from another review site to a "Sorry, this item is no longer available" page. The company's accessories store does stock a good selection of USB external hard drives, however.

Above the DVD burner, you'll see two front-mounted USB ports along with Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard, CompactFlash/Microdrive, Memory Stick/Pro, and SMC/xD slots for flash memory cards. A clever Copy button automatically copies images from your digital camera's card into a specified folder such as My Pictures, deleting the originals to free up flash space if you like.

Out back, the expected Ethernet and four additional USB ports are joined by PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports (the FX7020 comes with a PS/2 keyboard and USB mouse), along with speaker and mic ports and infrared transceiver connectors to let the TV tuner talk to a set-top box. The tuner offers coaxial cable, ATSC, S-Video and left and right audio jacks, while the graphics card has one S-Video and two DVI connectors -- Gateway tapes over the back panel's inoperative VGA connector.

Loosening two thumbscrews lets you remove the left side panel for a look under the hood (actually, you'll have had a pretty good look already through the large ventilation grille). Besides the available 5.25-inch drive bay, there's room for a second internal 3.5-inch hard drive next to the 500GB, 7,200-rpm Seagate Barracuda -- let us refresh your memory about that 400-watt power supply. A thicket of cables above the ECS motherboard obscures four DIMM sockets, populated with two 1GB and two 512MB modules for a dual-channel 3GB configuration.

The EVGA GeForce 8800 GT card occupies the lone PCI Express x16 slot. The AverMedia analog/digital TV tuner -- capable of receiving HDTV over the air or in unscrambled ClearQAM cable format, but not premium cable -- fills one of two PCI Express x1 slots. The single PCI slot is taken by a fax modem.