Digital Trends

Gateway FX540XT

April 1st, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

This PC is very heavy, and to assist customers in removing it from the box Gateway has implemented a clever set of cardboard wrap-around handles. You just grab the handles, pull it out of the box, and set the whole thing down on the floor. The handles then naturally fall away and the PC is free and ready to be hooked up.

First Boot

Upon arriving at the Windows desktop for the first time we were disappointed to see, once again, that this “gaming” machine has the exact same software build as every other Gateway we’ve reviewed, from notebooks to desktops. It has the same “employee photo of a river somewhere” desktop wallpaper, the same apps installed, and the same peripherals. It doesn’t differentiate itself from other Gateways at all. We’ve complained about this before. A gaming machine isn’t just two videocards and a fast CPU, it’s about much more than that, and the fact that Gateway chooses to ignore little details like the desktop wallpaper, pre-installed software and the design of the peripherals is disappointing. We’ve also seen this chassis a number of times before as well, and would advise Gateway to ditch it in favor of something sexier.

Performance Testing

Since gaming rigs usually push the envelope in terms of performance, we always perform a rudimentary torture test on them – especially if they’re overclocked – to make sure they are stable. Sadly, the Gateway was not stable at all. We began by simply taxing two of its four CPU cores and looping 3DMark06, but it crashed and rebooted after a half-hour or so.

Sensing the overclock wasn’t stable, we then loaded up all four cores with the toughest test around – Prime95. (link: http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm). This program will stress out a CPU and memory worse than any program we’ve ever come across, and is great for checking stability on an overclocked system. And sure enough, within ten seconds of loading the fourth iteration of Prime95 the FX540XT Blue Screen’d.

The FX540XT went BSOD on us after ten seconds of Prime95

We did this Prime95 experiment a few times and it reliably crashed every single time. Though we figured the FX540XT was just overclocked a bit too high, we reasoned that sometimes bad memory can also cause blue screens, so we rebooted and ran Memtest. This program runs patterns on memory to determine if RAM is bad or not, and the scans can take hours to finish. Luckily for us, within a few minutes the screen was filled with errors, meaning the RAM was having some issues.

Within a few minutes of starting Memtest the screen was filled with errors

Just out of curiosity, we then downclocked the system to stock speeds and sure enough, all our stability problems vanished. We even ran MemTest again and it reported no errors, so the overclock must have done something funky to the memory, which is odd since it was a multiplier overclock and not a FSB overclock (which also overclocks memory).

We left the system downclocked at 3.0GHz throughout testing to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues, and there weren’t any. We gamed for hours and experienced zero issues. However, we must note that even at stock speeds the intake fan on the BTX cooler was way too loud, and would spin up for no reason at all. It would even spin up when we began installing applications, loading a web page or just sitting at the desktop! It is so loud, in fact, that we could hear it from the next room. We’ve seen plenty of overclocked systems that were rock solid and dead quiet, so Gateway has no excuses in this department.