Digital Trends

Gateway FX7020

January 24th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We hoisted the FX7020 out of its box and undressed it with our eyes. It’s certainly not as cool as a Blackbird or something of that ilk, but it does not look cheap or plasticky like the previous FX PCs did, in our opinion. The all-black exterior looks nice, but the faux carbon fiber is almost “trying too hard” we think.

Gateway includes a huge poster that shows all the components on the PC and how to connect everything. It’s a nifty guide for people who don’t know how to get their PC up and running. Once we had everything connected, we booted to Windows.

Once we were at the desktop, we were a little disappointed because it had the same look as every other Gateway we’ve reviewed. It had the same desktop wallpaper, same icons, same pre-installed software. 

We were disappointed to see the FX machine set up just like any other Gateway PC.

What is the point of making this PC an “FX” rig if it’s going to be just like any other Gateway? We expected it to at least be like the FX notebook we recently reviewed, which had a cool FX logo on the desktop. The best case scenario would be if Gateway would allow people to configure their FX machines with no additional software.

Torture testing

Since we’re sadists, the first thing we did with the FX7020 was install 3DMark06 and loop it for 24 hours to make sure the system was stable out of the box. We woke up in the morning and the system was purring right along, with no signs of trouble. We decided to up the ante a bit, and ran four instances of CPU Burn-in alongside 3DMark06, just to see if the system could handle it, and it did. Temps were quite remarkable on the CPU, as it was just 61C under load. We’re used to seeing quad-core processors run super-hot, so we were surprised to see the Phenom run relatively cool.

The 8800 GT however, got very hot, most likely because there is no airflow near the card due to the lack of a fan to cool the hard drives. During testing we saw it get up to 88C, which is incredibly hot.

During torture testing the NVIDIA 8800GT got up to 88C, which is super hot.

Gaming

We don’t run 30 game benchmarks like some sites, but we do put in a few hours of serious game time to make sure a system labeled as a “gaming system” has the chops to back it up. Given this system’s specs, we expected good things.

First we installed Crysis, which is the current system torturing champion. It has extremely high system requirements to run with all its bells and whistles enabled. We ran the game for hours and hours and hours, and then ran it some more, and actually ran into what seemed like an overheating problem with the videcard. We would just let the game run with Nomad standing on the beach, for example, and every time we let it run for about four hours the game’s shadows would start flickering rapidly on the screen, and there was artifacts on the screen as well. We shut it down, let it cool off, and repeated the test several times and we saw the flickering every time. We checked the date of the videocard drivers and they were a few months old, so we installed the latest version and the problem went away. We also tested the 7020 with Call of Duty 4 and performed the same tests, and had no issues.