Gateway Upgrades Retail PCs To Up To 6 GB Of Memory

By Wolfgang Gruener
published

Gateway announced its updated retail notebook and desktop PC offering for the back-to-school season with prices ranging from $549.99 to $1,149.99 MSRP. The notebooks cover screen sizes of 14.1-inch, 15.4-inch and 17-inch and come in various colors such as red, blue, silver and grey, depending on the retailer. Prices are hovering around the $800 mark for mainstream models.

Desktops are starting at $550, but it is the high-end FX4710 that comes with a few noteworthy features. Next to its Core 2 Quad Q9300 processor and an Nvidia GeForce 9800GT graphics card and a 640 GB hard drive, the PC comes with 6 GB of system memory. At a suggested retail price of $1150, (some retailers are offering the PC for $1100) we would have expected a Blu-ray drive to be part of the package, but it seems such an offering is delayed at least until the Christmas season.

Wolfgang Gruener
12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • customisbetter
    9800GT?
    Reply
  • Noya
    $1,150 for a shite motherboard, locked BIOS, and mid-range graphics card? Not to mention RAM is dirt cheap, as is the 640gb WD. All crammed into some goofy little case with atrocious cooling...no thanks.

    Look over to your right, under the NEWS and REVIEWS headers- all Gateway. Now we all know Tom's runs on adverts and sells out to anyone with money (Nvidia), but you just have to laugh at Gateway. Tom's is still an enthusiast site (somewhat) where people come to learn about components and putting together a PC, Gateway's ad execs must be morons.
    Reply
  • Neog2
    Uh actually for sometime now, Gateways FX line that can be bought
    and most Bestbuys The two lower end models, both contain an 8800GT.

    One has Q6600, other has Q9300, but whats even more interesting than that, is Dell, Gateway, and HP, all having desktops with 6gigs of memory. Its not about the fact that memory is dirt cheap, its just the
    fact that they have it in these sytems.

    Bestbuy has a Dell I believe it is the 110B that has a Q6600 six gigs of memory and either a 500GB, or 640GB hard drive for $949.

    Also HP now mainly uses ASUS motherboards, so expect there new Elites the M series of there desktops that now come with 6gigs in future versions to maybe even have overclocker friendly bioses.

    And Gateway (ACER) Is all over AMD right now, after ACER bought Gateway last year I started seeing those AMD processor, AMD (ATI) chipset motherboards coming out. Then I blieve Gateway was the first Big Box
    Brand to start offering Hybrid Motherboards back in April of this year.

    Hybrid Crossfire motherboards are pretty cool on performance.
    So even if its not a true gaming machine for most hard core people

    A Machine that has a Q9300 Six Gigs of Memory, EVGA 8800GT OC and 640Gigs of hard drive for $1149 is pretty impressive no matter
    how much you try to downnplay it. Its getting harder and harder
    to build systems from scratch. Might as well go buy a machine,
    upgrade the power supply for $100 and by the graphics card of choice.

    Because you will have tons of hard drive space, and memory.
    And the cases on the gateway are actually pretty huge, all most
    as big as the Dell Xps cases.
    Reply
  • nukemaster
    More ram for mainstream systems is a GOOD thing. lets super fetch do its thing.
    Reply
  • duxducis
    Hmm pushing 64bit windows to Retail? thats a step in right direction, but i been in store yesterday and still found many PC or laptops selling with 512-1gb with vista in year 2008 that's sad
    Reply
  • mrmessma
    Not to insult Neog2 but I don't see why it is getting harder and harder to build a system from scratch. Being able to choose your own case, own motherboard, are probably the two best things about building your own, not to mention being able to overclock if a decent HSF is your cup of tea.
    Also, if my motherboard goes bad I like being able to send it to Asus and not Gateway, but that might just be my own unshared opinion.
    I do like pushing 64 bit windows, it is going to have to happen eventually.
    Reply
  • TwoDigital
    I'm not a huge fan of the OS driving hardware requirements just for the heck of it... but having said that, I'm a bit surprised that MS released an x86 Vista version in 32-bit. They claim you need 1gb for decent performance anyway, so the 4gb memory limit seems like it would have been a good time to move to 64-bit-only. (Understand... I'm saying this since Vista is driving other hardware requirements already that are causing people to shy away from upgrading.)
    Reply
  • bf2gameplaya
    If you are actually going to use 6GB of system memory in your PC activities and are using a 64-bit multi-core aware OS with a Quad-Core CPU you need a more robust motherboard than anything ACER (Gateway) makes.

    You would need better power management including PSU, better thermal management including case ventilation and better BIOS control, which I am sure this OEM mobo does not excel. Managing a lot of RAM is tricky still, unless you don't want to use it in any sort of high performance profile, more like a mediocre cache for your HDD.
    Reply
  • Tetra_Stryf
    RE: Neog2 Are you sure that you saw a Dell with 6 GB of memory at BestBuy? I don't recognize 110B or 1108 as a model and unless its a Precision or a Server then its max memory that Dell offers is 4 GB because of the whole 32 bit problem. Plus they don't offer a 64 bit OS unless your purchasing a Precision or Server and they don't offer those lines in retail stores because they don't want them to get retail(India, Korea) support. Also the real reason why you don't want to buy pre built machines is so that you don't have to deal with the crappy manufacturing that comes with an OEM motherboard. As we all know, Dell had a huge capacitor issue a few years back but did you realize that those were Asus board and Dell recently stopped manufacturing with Asus and moved to Foxconn because of all the problems and lost money due to other manufacturers. Don't kid yourselves people. Dell, HP, Gateway, etc... don't manufacture anything inside of that case. All they make is chassis plastics, keyboard plastics, mouse plastics and LCD plastics. All the internals are manufactured by other companies.
    Reply
  • Gateway have always been pretty poor machines this just proves it still...
    Reply