Gateway Fx6800-01e Review – Intel Core I7 Powered Gaming Rig

Sitting on the SlashGear test bench for the past week or so has been Gateway’s FX6800-01e PC, and boy have we wanted to tell you about it. Outwardly there’s little to suggest – beyond the color scheme, which edges on the vibrant – that the FX6800-01e is anything other than a standard Gateway machine, but the giveaway is the discrete Intel Core i7 badge. This is one of the first systems to use Intel’s next-gen processor, formerly known as Nehalem, marking a significant architecture change from the Core series. The FX6800-01e is based on an Intel Core i7-920 2.66GHz quad-core processor; the biggest question remains, is performance increase as revolutionary as the architecture?
Physically, there’s little to distinguish the new FX6800 from the Gateway FX6710, which launched recently. The case stands around 18-inches high, finished in black with orange metallic accents, and up front there’s a 15-in-1 memory card reader, two USB 2.0 ports and a Firewire socket. The first drive bay slot sports a touch panel navigation system, with volume and media controls. Round the back there are a further six USB ports, another Firewire, two eSATA ports and two PS/2 ports, together with gigabit ethernet, a modem and one COM port.

Aside from the Core i7-920, the FX6800-01e has 3GB of DDR3, triple-channel 1066MHz RAM, a 750GB 7,200rpm SATA-II hard-drive, SuperMulti-format DVD burner with LabelFlash and 7.1-channel high-def audio with Creative’s X-Fi XtremeGamer sound enhancement. Graphics come courtesy of ATI’s Radeon HD 4850, with 512MB of its own GDDR3 graphics memory, two DVI ports (with HDMI and VGA adapters included) and a single S-Video output. Gateway made storage expansion straightforward by providing two SATA drive bays fitted with swap-cages in the front drive slot.

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