Digital Trends

Gateway P-6860FX

June 23rd, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and testing

Pulling the P-6860FX out of its box we were reminded that it is indeed a big-boned notebook, but it doesn’t feel quite as big as Dell’s monstrous XPS M1730. According to the spec sheet the P-6860FX weighs 9.2 pounds, which is hefty but not back-breaking.

Its look and feel was very familiar to us, as its design is exactly the same as its big brother, the P-171XL FX Edition. It has a full-size keyboard with a number pad and feels very well-made and not cheap at all. It’s very rigid, and we like the faux carbon fiber accents around the touchpad as well.

You’ll either love or hate the black and copper paint scheme with its faux carbon fiber accents

First boot

We pressed the power button and waited patiently for the P-6860FX to boot. It arrived at the desktop in 1 minute and 10 seconds, which is par for the course on Vista machines. We’ve only seen a handful of machines boot faster than this, so this kind of performance is to be expected from Vista it seems. 

We looked around the desktop and were pleased that the only icon on the desktop was for eBay and a Microsoft Office 2007 Trial. Gateway included some more trialware such as Napster and NetZero but thankfully it didn’t muck up the desktop with links to these services. Gateway’s little BigFix icon kept winking at us from the system tray but we’ve seen this application – which downloads updates and software patches for you – on every Gateway machine we’ve ever reviewed.

General Use and Comfort

The full-sized keyboard is very spacious and easy to use, and we also liked the big and bright display. We typically review more ultra-portable notebooks than desktop replacements, so it was a nice change of pace to see some serious screen real estate for once. The onboard speakers are typical notebook fare in that they lack serious bottom end, but they certainly get sufficiently loud for gaming or music. Speaking of which, volume is controlled by soft-touch buttons above the keyboard, and though we hated them on the P171XL we have to say they didn’t bother us as much this time around. We found that if we tried tapping the buttons they were useless, but if we held our finger down the volume would slowly increase or decrease, but an on-screen volume indicator would help out immensely here because many times when we pressed the buttons we weren’t sure if they were doing anything. 

In terms of general system performance, we ran PCMark Vantage on the P-6860FX to see how it stacked up against other gaming notebooks we’ve reviewed, and its score of 2,789 was impressive but not as high as the Alienware m15x or the Dell XPS M1730. To be fair to the Gateway though, both of those machines costs twice as much as the P-6860FX and also have better hardware.