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| Gateway 700S |
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Hardware Reviews December 2001 • Vol.4 Issue 12 |
Gateway 700S | ||
 If you're bargain hunting for a solid home PC with a flat-panel display, check out the 700S from Gateway. The system has pretty good hardware, and the flat-panel display leaves plenty of room on your desk. Besides, it looks cool. The 700S is similar to Gateway's 500XL, but the 700S has a couple extra features and only costs $50 more. Specifications. The 700S is the most economical of the new 700 series of PCs from Gateway. It has a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor and includes the Windows XP Home Edition OS. The system also has 256MB of RDRAM and a 400MHz bus. Gateway skimps a little on the video card in the 700S, using an NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400. The video card has 64MB of SDRAM. I'd prefer a GeForce2 Ti video card or perhaps a RADEON card, but the MX 400 is good enough for most computing tasks. The 700S's hook is the optional flat-panel display, a $200 upgrade. Gateway sent us the flat-panel display for our testing, so we included the display's price as part of the system's total price. The 700S has a basic audio configuration, with a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value sound card and a three-piece set of Boston Acoustic speakers, which are better than the speakers included with most PCs. The storage hardware in the 700S is typical for most PCs in this price range. The system has a 16X DVD-ROM drive and a 16X/10X/40X CD-RW drive. I noticed the DVD-ROM drive makes a lot of noise when it spins up a disc, which is pretty annoying. The hard drive is 80GB, so you'll have plenty of room for all your MP3s, downloaded recipes, and video clips. The 700S also has a 56Kbps modem and a 10/100 network adapter. Design. The 700's midtower case has five PCI slots, only one of which is not in use. The system also has five 3.5-inch drive bays, with three available. Both of the 5.25-inch drive bays are occupied. One of the advantages of the 700S over Gateway's similarly configured 500XL is the selection of ports. Like the 500XL, the 700S has only one serial and one parallel port. The system does have four USB ports and three IEEE 1394 ports, whereas the 500XL has no IEEE 1394 ports. The 700S has an optical wheel mouse, which is a nice touch. Performance. I was a little disappointed in the SYSmark2001 scores the 700S posted. The Overall score was only 143, which is a little lower than average for a 1.8GHz PC. In fact, the Gateway 500XL's SYSmark2001 scores were slightly better, despite the fact the 500XL has a 1.7GHz processor and uses SDRAM rather than RDRAM. The 700S's Office Productivity score was 132 and the Internet Content Creation score was 156. I expected these scores to be about five to 10 points higher. The 700S performed better in the 3DMark2001 test, scoring a 2,454 total. That's an average score, but it's not bad considering the system's video card. I popped a DVD movie into the 700S and watched a few chapters. The image quality was solid, and the audio quality was pretty good, too, considering the basic three-piece speaker system. The Boston Acoustic subwoofer dished out a lot of bass despite the fact it's about the same size as a toaster. One task the 700S won't excel at is running PC games. I played a few rounds of Quake III, and the game ran pretty well, but I could only run the game at a maximum resolution of 1,024 x 768. The flat-panel display won't support higher resolutions when playing Quake III. I played several audio tracks on the 700S and was impressed with the quality of the speakers. The subwoofer provides ample bass for the music, and the satellite speakers, although not great, are acceptable. Final word. The 700S is a good general-purpose PC, as long as your main purpose for buying a PC isn't to play the latest video games. The 700S is preferable to Gateway's similarly configured 500XL because the 700S has a larger hard drive and includes IEEE 1394 ports, plus it's only $50 more than the 500XL. by Michael Sweet
$1,699 Gateway (800) 846-4208 (605) 232-2000 www.gateway.com
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