No Disassemble!
For those of you who like seeing the
innards of the various notebooks we review, the following might disappoint you
slightly. You see, we didn't really feel it was necessary to completely
disassemble the Gateway FX chassis. The reasoning behind this should be quite
obvious, however: there are two access panels on the bottom of the laptop,
which provide you the ability to upgrade all the critical components — including
the CPU!
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Normally, you need to go to great
lengths to access a notebook CPU socket. Generally speaking, you will need to
remove 15 to 20 screws from the top and bottom of the notebook, take off the
keyboard, and sometimes even remove the LCD panel. Only then can you gain
access to the CPU socket. On the Gateway FX, five small screws are all that
stand between you and a new CPU (not counting the six or so additional screws on the heatsink/heatpipe). It's almost as though Gateway is expecting
some users will want to upgrade the CPU, so they made it easier, or maybe they're just being nice to the assembly workers. Also under the
main panel are the SO-DIMM sockets and a couple of mini-PCI slots (one of which
is occupied by the wireless networking card).
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The second access panel hides the
two hard drive bays. On the lower-end models, only one of the hard drive bays
is occupied, but end-users could easily add a second hard drive should they so
desire. The hard drives are installed in metal trays that slide into the
chassis.
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ap90033 - Sunday, March 30, 2008 - link
Yes it comes with a Vista Home Premium DVD....win32asmguy - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I bought one of these yesterday at Best Buy after they put it on sale for $1249 again.It does indeed have a real Vista re-install cd. The CD also includes none of the extra bundled applications or such. However, you can also make a "restore" DVD from an included program that will recreate its 10GB recovery partition and return it to a factory fresh installation. Its nice to see Gateway let people go either way with this.
The P-6831fx is also actually due for an update soon. Its supposed to be called the P-6860fx and will have a T5550 (1.83ghz, 667fsb, 2mb) and a 320GB hdd instead of the 250GB. My P-6831fx actually already has a T5550 in it, as gateway's ODM has appeared to already run out of the T5450's as of the last shipment. The slower processor is definitely a setback, but I will eventually upgrade to a T9300 to close the gap in performance even closer to the laptops with the GTX.
Oh, and CPU-Z does report that it runs in dual channel mode, however it also takes a small performance hit due to not being both 2GB sticks. Other users report their Vista memory experience index from jumping from 4.6 to 4.8 when upgrading to 4GB.
iclicku - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
The laptop comes with a Vista DVD. However, you'll have to burn a back-up DVD for drivers and applications. It should be the first thing you do before performing a format.The laptop should be fine for Folding @ Home. If not, a simple CPU upgrade should do wonders.
As for the 3GB of ram, it is in fact running in dual channel mode so no worries there. It's definately useful since Vista needs as much memory it can get it's grubby little hands on.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
[quote] Imagine being able to buy a very nice sports car that could compete with the Dodge Viper at one third the cost, and that's what Gateway has released on the market. [/quote]In other words it is the Evo/STI of the gaming laptop world. Maybe one of the ones with the bigger screens qualifies as a base Corvette.
Corland - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
It would be nice to see things like the MacBook Pro with LED backlight (or a regular MacBook) in the color comparison and LCD tests for comparison sake- comparing gaming laptop LCD's to each other is fine, but having some other common laptop screens that some of us will have worked with would also be useful....iclicku - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
As the review states, you can't beat the value of this laptop. I purchased this laptop at Best Buy during the President's Day sale for $1199 and it came with a $50 game (COD4). Out of the box, it's a great machine. However, the review doesn't mention the amount of bloatware that is on the machine (which is commonplace).I managed to place a few upgrades in my machine. I placed a T7500 C2D, 4GB total ram, 200GB 7200RPM HD, and wiped my machine and installed a dual boot with Vista Business 64-bit and XP Pro 32-bit. I got great deals on the upgrades and the OSes I had from previous machines. Total cost of machine came to $1500.
3dMark06 scores are as follows: (drivers I used are 169.09 from laptopvideo2go.com)
Vista 64 - 8900
XP Pro 32 - 9150
tomek1984 - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Give me few hints how you got video driver to work with XP. I downloaded 169.09 and tried installing it with base file and 2nd time with an updated one by INF file. Nether1 recognized Nvidia hardware. I am using 6860 FX with factory specs+ 2nd harddrive(XP is instaled on 2nd HD)Starcub - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link
I got a newer driver from laptopvideo2go.com to work by replacing the inf file with nvwi.inf which I extracted from the included originalinfs.zip.ap90033 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Nice, I have one and wondered what the difference would be if I upgraded the CPU...Great review by the way.
ToeJuice - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I own an Asus G2 and it's one of the better (if not the best) midrange gaming laptops I've ever owned or seen. But I guess Asus lappies don't even deserve a mention here?