14 DAY TRIAL // Gateway has refurbished its popular line of low-cost gaming desktop systems. It might be hard to imagine a low-budget system that comes rigged with a quad-core Phenom CPU and an NVIDIA 8800 GT, but Gateway's offering is as real as possible.
The new FX 7020 desktop cannot compete with the sophisticated rigs from Dell (the XPS 720) or HP (the Blackbird 002). However, for a little over $1000 you get a great gaming desktop system that is extremely silent with extremely appealing specifications. The company did upgrade not only its hardware, but also the machine's looks.
The FX-7020 comes equipped with the latest and hottest product from AMD, the 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 quad-core processor. The four processing cores share 2 MB of L3 cache pool and is cooled with an air-based solution. The system is built around Nvidia's 150SE chipset designed for AMD's AM2+ socket. The chipset can support up to 3GB of PC2 5300 DDR2 memory.
Since the graphics aspect is essential when talking about gaming, the system comes equipped with a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, a video card that offers the best price and performance score. The card features 112 stream processors and 512MB of memory, and delivers almost the same performance as a high-end GTX card for half its price.
The chassis was also refurbished to match a gamer's rig. The previous BTX chassis has been replaced with an ATX one that has been stripped down by the ridiculous air duct in the middle of the case. Moreover, it is painted all-black with horizontal vertical strips on the 5'25-inch bays. The company has included a 15-in-1 card reader on top of the case. To sum this up, that's how my dream-like computer case looks like.
The FX 7020 is a fully-fledged media center. It comes with a built-in TV tuner and a Media Center remote control. The "ripped" video files can be stored on a generous, 500 GB SATA-II hard disk drive manufactured by Seagate Technologies. The built-in soundcard is signed by Realtek and delivers 7.1 audio quality to complete the Media Center picture.