Gateway DX4300-03: The Question here is ‘Why?’
July 31 2009 Categorized Under: Desktop Computers Tags; $750 desktop, amd phenom x4, ati radeon hd, desktop, DX4300-03, gateway, Gateway DX4300-03, mid range desktop 12 Commented
Gateway’s DX4300-03 has everything that you might ask for except one or two crucial parts. It is easily outperformed by its competition but its design sets it apart. It has a kind of a usability that people have come to expect from Gateway. It is a good package and will perform okay till you start comparing it with the competition.
Before we get to the performance (i.e. the bad part) let’s look at the design (i.e. the good part). The Gateway DX4300-03 boasts of a tower design that sets it apart from the other desktops in the market. The design is not gimmicky but a sensible one. It not only gives you easy access to all the common buttons and ports on the system, it also keeps the front panel clean and stylish.
It has created a sort of overhanging cliff like structure on the top front edge of the tower. On this outcrop it provides you with all the common slots and ports that you are likely to use. So you have the card reader slots, two USB ports and headphone and microphone ports. Behind the outcrop, on the top of the tower you have the power button. The two eject buttons for the two optical drive bays are on either sides of the power button. Beyond these three buttons lies a square depression where you have two more USB ports.
This is a very intelligent design move on Gateways part and it definitely has a lot of practical thinking behind it. This comes in very handy for those who keep their towers at a lower level than their desk. If you look at PC workstations you will realize that most of them have the provision for the tower at the bottom. Some people also keep the tower on the floor beside their desks or on a low platform. Thus by having all the major controls, slots and ports on the top, Gateway gives the user quick and easy access to them. One thing to note here is that the second optical bay is empty so there is use for only one eject button when you get the machine.
When it comes to the rest of the features, the Gateway DX4300-03 is not the sharpest tool in the shade. For one thing though – it has a TV tuner card. TV tuner cards are fast becoming passé in PCs and most users would happily get something else in its place like a Blu Ray drive. Some of you might think of turning it in to a DVR but that is hardly something that people are looking for these days. I for one would like to have my PC perform better.
The Gateway DX4300-03 comes with a 2.4GHz AMD Phenom X4 9750 processor. It is definitely a powerful system but you can get a rig from Asus that has a faster 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad 8300 processor for the same price. However, without that comparison in mind, you can do a lot of things with the machine. The computing power is enough to crunch the most demanding applications with ease. When it comes to multitasking however, the benchmark tests from reviewers show that it is not at all at par with the competition in the same price bracket.
The rig comes with 8GB DDR2 RAM running at 800MHz. It has 4 SO-DIMM slots with a 2GB module in each slot. This much RAM is fairly standard issue in most of the desktop systems in this range and is going to be enough for the coming few years. Unless you are looking to do something fairly professional that requires a lot of RAM space, you should not need to upgrade the RAM on this machine.
Coming to the graphics part, the Gateway DX4300-03 comes with an ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. This 3D card has HDMI, DVI and VGA out. Gateway has made an intelligent choice here. It has chosen a graphics card that has all the video outputs that the motherboard has. This is important because when a discrete graphics card is used, it automatically disables the video outputs of the motherboard. Thus, you won’t be left wishing for the motherboard’s outputs that were disabled by the graphics card.
This is not a gaming machine by any stretch but it can handle moderate gaming if you have modest expectations. The recent scalable games that can be adjusted to suit the machine will work fine on this machine. The visuals wont be stellar but it will be playable. Looking at the various benchmark tests, it is clear that here too the DX4300-03 is outperformed by the competition.
On the storage front we have a giant 1TB storage solution, which is larger than the average for this segment. This is one of the few points of advantage that the Gateway DX4300-03 has over its competition. The hard disk spins at 7200 rpm, which is a standard for this price segment. Thus it has a speedy hard drive that has a lot of space for storage. You are not likely to be filling up this much space in a hurry. Even if you do, you can add in another drive via the lone empty hard drive bay.
On the networking front we have one Gigabit Ethernet port and wireless with a 802.11b/g rated Wi-Fi. There’s also an inbuilt modem, which is fairly useless to most people these days. Who uses dial up anyway? It lacks the 802.11n wifi that some of the competing desktops have. It comes with a dual-layer DVD burner which is again pretty much average for this price range.
There isn’t much space for upgrading the system. There is only one more bay for an extra hard drive. All the standard PCI slots are taken. You can of course take down the modem and put something else in there but doing that would be doing away with something that you have paid for.
The Gateway DX4300-03 does not have too many ports. Other than the ones already mentioned there is also a firewire and four more USB 2.0 ports. There is no eSATA and no digital audio output. It only has a 7.1 analogue output.
I’m kind of irritated and feel really cheated. I got this thing yesterday expecting it’s promise of being able to handle gaming to be true.
It takes absolutely forever to download anything at all, and although it runs very well on web browsers, and can quickly burn cds and handle menial work, it’s not what I was looking for. After gushing over the nice card I saw on the box, and the 8GB of memory, and all the positive reviews from everywhere I’d looked, I bought the damned thing. It SUCKS FOR VIDEO GAMES. DO NOT BUY THIS. WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT BUY THIS.
MY DOWNLOAD SPEED IS 13.24 KB/s ON AVERAGE. CHRIST.
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