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The NV5214u is one of the first entries in Gateway’s new NV line of low-cost, mid-performance notebooks designed for back-to-school students, budget-conscience multimedia aficionados and consumers with a balance of power and price in mind. It measures 14.6″ wide x 9.8″ deep x 1″ wide and 5.2 pounds, which for a 15+” notebook is still quite svelte.

The NV has a 15.6″ Widescreen LCD monitor with a maximum resolution of 1366 x 768. That means that it is EXACTLY the resolution needed for widescreen 16:9, 1080p, High Definition video. The screen is bright, evenly lit, and the ultrabright surface is readable even in direct sunlight. It had exceptional brightness, beautifully saturated colors, and great image quality — Probably because the NV series uses LED backlighting which has the added benefit of being more power efficient than the CCFL backlight more commonly used in laptops.

The screen is driven by an ATI HD3200 Mobile Radeon chipset. Though not the fastest graphics part in the ATI inventory, it’s far better than the Integrated Intel graphics that are normally bundled with a notebook of this price. It was more than enough to play video at 1080p and should be more than enough for high definition video playback and even some light gaming.

Gateway has topped off the display with a 1.3MP camera that can be used for stills or video. For those into web conferencing or live-streaming, Gateway has included an integrated microphone next to the camera.

The Gateway NV5214u is powered by a dual-core AMD Athlon QL-64, running at 2.1Ghz with a 1MB cache. It’s backed up by 4GB of dual-channel DDR2 memory in two SODIMM slots. All of the components sit on top of an AMD RS780MN chipset.

The NV5214u comes in honeycomb brown, which has a nice textured look. The left side of the NV has a Kensington lock port built into the display hinge, the power port, the Ethernet port, VGA connector, HDMI port, two USB ports, jacks for the microphone and headphones, and a 5-in-1 card reader.

The right side of the notebook starts with the power button recessed into the hinge, a RJ-11 connector for the modem, two more USB ports, and the tray-loaded CD-DVD burner.

The NV5214u comes loaded with a 320GB 5400rpm Toshiba SATA hard drive loaded in an easy-access caddy, a tray-mounted Super Multi DVD dual-layer burner, and a 5-in-1 multimedia card reader that works with SD, MMC, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro and xD memory cards.

The touchpad and wrist-rest on the NV are both well-designed. The wrist rest offsets the touchpad to the left, and the touchpad itself has good sensitivity with no lag. There is a large Gateway bar across the bottom of the touchpad which provides two buttons for your mouse functions.

Gateway also includes at-a-glance status lights and touch-sensitive controls at the top of the keyboard. You get a set of LEDs for hard drive activity, caps lock, numlock, and bluetooth, then a series of indicators and touch-sensitive-buttons that can launch the auto-backup, activate or deactivate the wireless, disable the touchpad, and control the volume.

The fan on the NV5214u complements a well-crafted airflow channel through the notebook that keeps everything cool without needing a noisy cooling solution. It was barely noticeable when the NV was being used for light duty work, and even under load the fan was a whisper in the background and the notebook stayed cool.

Power for the NV is provided by a 6-cell, 4400mAh battery that provides 48 Watt/Hours of juice. At full-power, with the CPU pegged, wireless on, screen at full brightness and the DVD spinning, the NV lasted 1 hour 43 minutes. With the screen dropped to 60% brightness, the CPU kept at 50% and the wireless on, life increased to 2 hours 47 minutes. With the wireless off, brightness turned down to minimum and the cpu only being used for word processing and light multimedia, we were able to squeeze 3 hours 35 minutes out of the battery.

As for performance, the NV performed admirably if not remarkably. In PCMark Vantage the NV averaged a score of almost 2600. These aren’t the highest scores in this class of notebook, but they are higher than any similarly priced notebook and this level of performance should still be more than enough for most work and multimedia tasks.

Overall, the NV continues Gateway’s recent hit parade of notebooks that offer an excellent price-to-performance ratio without skimping on style or durability. The NV5214u is a fine notebook for those who crave a low-budget computer but don’t want to be limited by the anemic processing power or small screen of a netbook, nor the greater bulk and cost of a 17″ behemoth.

The Gateway NV series is available now. You can find most of them in your choice of four colors and they comes with a 1-yr warranty. The price of our review unit was $499.