Digital Trends

Gateway FX540XT

April 1st, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Features and Design

The FX540XT is the top-of-the-line gaming machine in Gateway’s FX lineup. There are less-expensive variants, the cheapest being the $1,279 USD FX540B. None of these systems have customizable hardware, as they are pre-designed configurations you cannot change. You can add or remove accessories and software, but the hardware is locked in when you buy. 


Overclocked Gateway?

We were surprised to find out this rig is overclocked. And we’re not talking about some dinky little 200MHz either. They’ve cranked the Intel QX6850 from 3.0GHz all the way up to 3.66GHz, which is ambitious given how hot these chips can get. Even more surprisingly, Gateway doesn’t use any special cooling either, but continues to employ the standard BTX chassis and cooling setup it’s used in all the previous FX machines, even though this PC uses an NVIDIA 680i LT chipset.
 

Overclocked GPUs Too

Gateway didn’t just overclock the processor and call it a day. They took it to the next level and overclocked the machine’s dual NVIDIA 8800 GTX cards too, cranking them up from the stock clock speed of 575MHz to 600MHz. Memory speeds are also tweaked from 900MHz to 925MHz. Powering the cards is a proprietary Gateway power supply that pumps out 700w.

HD Movies

Even though HD DVD is not long for this world, the FX540XT has all the HD bases covered with a combo HD DVD/Blu-ray optical drive. It can read both HD and Blu-ray formats but cannot write to them. It can write to DVD and CDs, however. The disc can also create LightScribe labels on special media.

Storage

The FX540XT includes two 500GB 7,200rpm hard drives that are striped into a RAID 0 array. This setup theoretically increases transfer speeds since both drives divvy up the duties and work in tandem. The only downside to this approach is exactly half of all the data resides on each drive, so if one fails all data is lost.

OS and Security

The FX540XT comes with Windows Vista Home Premium, and versions with SP1 pre-installed should be available by the time you read this. Security is handled by a 60-day subscription to Norton Internet Security. You can continue to use the program after 60 days, but you cannot get updates from Symantec, which effectively makes it useless.

Image Courtesy of Gateway