Gateway DX310 Series
This Gateway's most attractive feature is the price: under $800 for a system that's suitable for basic business and home computing needs. Driven by a 2.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor and 256MB of DDR266 SDRAM, the 310X earned a PC WorldBench 4 score of 108. Though its performance is a tad slow compared to most value systems we've tested recently, its speed is fine for simple computing tasks. Gateway included a 17-inch EV730 CRT monitor with the 310X. Text looked sharp and crisp on test screens of a newsletter and various fonts. Colors, however, appeared bland and washed out in games and a DVD movie. That flat image quality is matched by flat audio: The two speakers, despite their large size, sent out thin trebles; and bass notes lacked punch.
As with many other value PCs, the 310X isn't designed for demanding graphics tasks, such as high-action games. In our tests with Unreal Tournament and Quake III, the integrated graphics managed only sluggish frame rates at 16-bit color depth and at a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels; at 1280 by 1024 resolution and 32-bit color depth, frame rates were too low to make game play worthwhile. The motherboard lacks an AGP slot, so installing a top-end graphics card is not an option (although some fairly powerful PCI graphics cards are available).
Still, the 310X's minitower case offers room for modest upgrades, with two externally accessible drive bays (one 5.25 inches, the other 3.5), one memory socket, and two PCI slots unused. One feature we liked: A thick lever that spans the length of the drive bays keeps drives locked in place. You press the lever up to release drives and slip them out.
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