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gadget — Episode 097 – The Gateway FX540XT
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The Gateway FX540XT was the first in Gateway’s new line of high-performance, gaming-oriented, no-hold-bared desktops. It features a factory overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX6850 CPU operating at 3.66Ghz with a 1333Mhz bus, and 8MB of L2 cache. It has 4 sticks of 800Mhz DDR2 SDRAM for a total of 4GB of memory and everything lives on a NVIDIA nForce 680i LT-based motherboard that has 2 PCI express x16, one PCI express x 4, 1 PCI, and 1 PCI express standard slot.
The case itself is well constructed and has a solid feel. It has a 700 watt ATX power supply, giving you plenty of power for the 540 and headroom for future upgrades. Ports are plentiful in the FX series. Aside from the 1 USB 2.0 port integrated into the media card reader, the front of the unit has a microphone and headphone jack, two more USB ports and two firewire ports. The back of the 540 has PS2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, four more USB 2.0 ports, another firewire port, two Gigabit Ethernet connectors, and audio jacks that include surround sound and digital optical out. Opening the tool-less case is simple thanks to a single lever, quick-release system that lets you unlock and open the side panel with a single pull. Inside the case you’ll see that Gateway put as much thought into the organization of the various cables and ducting in the FX as they did into the specs. The case is deceptively large with two 5-1/4″ bays and two slots for 3-1/2″ drives, all with exterior access. Gateway has included another three interior 3-1/2″ bays for hard drives. All of the bays use quick-release slides to speed the removal of parts and upgrading of the system. Even the expansion cards can be pulled out with a simple twist of a thumb screw. Everything is tucked away and routed to maximize airflow and accessibility to the various hotspots of the system. A large green shroud dominates the inside of the case, blowing cold air directly onto the CPU and, along with a heat pipe assembly, negating the need for a noisy CPU fan. Sound is provided by a Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer PCI Sound card which provides excellent surround sound gaming. Storage options are plentiful. There are two optical drives, a 16X Super Multi Function DVD-RW/DVD-RAM, and a Hybrid HD-DVD/BlueRay player — a feature I really appreciated since I have quite the collection of HD-DVD titles, snatched up for pennies on the dollar when BlueRay “won” the format war. Main storage is provided by two 10,000rpm Serial ATA 300 hard drives setup in a RAID 0 array for blazing fast transfers. Gateway tops off the storage features with a 9-in-1 media card reader. |
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Of course, since the FX series are touted as gaming rigs, we have to take a look at its video horsepower. The raw strength of the 540 comes from the two mammoth EVGA PCI express video cards that are setup in SLI mode. Each of cards sports a factory overclocked NVIDIA 8800GTX GPU with 768MB of GDDR2 memory. Each card has two DVI-DualLink ports and a S-Video port for TV output. Though running the cards in SLI means that you’ll only need a single DualLink DVI port to harness the full power of both video cards, you can also connect up to two monitors to each card, for a total of 4 monitors across the desktop.
One of the really nice points of the entire FX line is that Gateway engineered large-diameter fans into their cases. Larger diameter blades can move the same amount of air as their smaller diameter brethren while spinning more slowly and therefore reducing noise. Combined with the ducted CPU cooling, the heat pipe, and the efficient cabling within the case, that means that the system is a screamer in CPU and GPU performance, but no louder than a well-designed dual-core all-purpose desktop. Enough about the specs… how does it perform… In a word… OMFG. Depending on how we tweaked the BIOS, the 540 scored 5.8 to 5.9 on the Windows Vista Experience scale. In PCMark Vantage we were getting scores between 5900 and 6100. It crushed all the benchmarks and left them begging for mercy… It did especially well in the gaming and storage benchmarks, really showing off the dual 10,000 rpm hard drives and the SLI video cards. In terms of real-world performance, the 540 took everything we threw at it and kept on grinning. Bioshock with all the eye candy turned on wasn’t even a blip on the performance screen. Crysis was handled with ease. And yes… for you WOW addicts out there, I was getting my priestly butt handed to me in beautiful high-resolution, full-framerate Azeroth. When we journeyed outside of the gaming world, we found the 540 to be even more useful with processor intensive tasks. Production runs that had taken 30 minutes or more on our old workstation took less than 5 minutes on the 540. Adobe Premier was blazingly fast with renders and even folding in the background didn’t seem to faze our high-resolution Photoshop sessions. All-in-all, this is STILL the fastest desktop that we’ve ever used… and that’ s a lot to say about a machine that is almost half a year old. The FX line of desktops are available now from your favorite retailers. They start at under $1000 for the FX540B to just under $3500 for the comparably equipped FX541XT. |
