Gateway SX2800-01

The good: Sleek, compact design; best all-around performance among budget retail PCs; up-to-date motherboard outputs offer all kinds of connectivity options.

The bad: Memory slot access takes a few more steps than usual.

The bottom line: Gateway's SX2800-01 offers a strong combination of performance and features all wrapped up in a design that fully embraces the merits of a slim tower PC. We recommend this system to anyone looking for a fast, affordable desktop for the home office, the living room, or anywhere in between.

Specifications: Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 (2.33 GHz) ; RAM installed: 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM ; Hard drive: 640 GB Standard ; See full specs

Price range: $489.95 - $509.99

Thanks to a strong set of features for its $510 price tag, Gateway's SX2800-01 impressed us enough to earn an Editors' Choice award. This PC demonstrated the best all-around performance in its budget PC class, making it a strong system for general productivity. An HDMI video output also lets you take full advantage of Gateway's particularly compact slim tower design if you're looking for a cheap PC to double as a media server. The SX2800-01 strikes such an even balance in its price, performance, and features for its price that we'd recommend it to anyone looking for a versatile, low-cost home computer.

It's clear from the design of the SX2800-01 that Gateway takes the slim tower PC concept seriously. Coming in at 11.5 inches high, 4 inches wide, and 14.25 inches deep, the SX2800-01 is smaller in every dimension than both the Dell Inspiron 537s and HP's Pavilion Slimline systems.

With that smaller size comes fewer expansion ports in the Gateway, and it's also harder to access the internal memory. You could also argue that because it only sells fixed configurations, Gateway doesn't have to cater/upsell to online customers with customization like Dell and HP, and can sacrifice some expansion room for a more compact design, That lets the SX2800-01 appeal to anyone looking to generally save space, and especially those interested in bringing a PC into the living room.

For core components, the primary difference between the Gateway SX2800-01 and the similar Dell Inspiron 537s is the CPU. Dell's Pentium Dual Core chip has a slightly faster clock speed, but you can see on our performance results below that the Gateway's Core 2 Quad makes up for its lower clock speed with better workload distribution, and thus better performance than the Dell on almost every test. That performance edge alone might be enough to justify the Gateway's slightly higher price tag.

Beyond the individual specs and its faster performance, the Gateway surpasses the Dell just as convincingly by way of its more up-to-date motherboard connections. On the back panel of the Inspiron 537s you'll see four USB 2.0 ports, a VGA video output, analog audio outputs, and an Ethernet jack. The Gateway has all of those as well as an HDMI output, an extra USB 2.0 port, digital audio out, and also a pair of PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard. HP's Pavilion Slimline, also a $510 slim tower, is similarly outclassed by the Gateway's sheer array of inputs.

Source : reviews.cnet.com