Full Review - Gaming, Battery Life and Conclusion
Gaming Performance Also, we must point out how pleasantly surprised we were by the P-6860FX’s cooling fans, which are probably the quietest fans we’ve heard on a gaming notebook. You can hear them, but just barely, and they are mostly inaudible if you turn up the volume a bit. Battery life Conclusion
With its Core 2 Duo processor, NVIDIA 8800 GTS graphics card and 4GB of system RAM, we expected the P-6860 to be plenty adequate for today’s and tomorrow’s games, and we were correct in that assumption. To test its gaming prowess we installed everyone’s favorite system-killer, Crysis, and though it was only able to run the game at medium detail at 1024x768, we were impressed by how well it ran at these settings. We also installed Call of Duty 4, which is less graphically demanding than Crysis but still looks great. On this title we were able to run the game at the panel’s native resolution of 1440x900 and it looked excellent. Finally, we ran 3DMark06 on it, and it scored 7,398 3Dmarks, which is better than average but not record-breaking.
Gaming notebooks typically have abysmal battery life given how much power they consume. We’re used to seeing most of them achieve an hour or maybe a bit more, but not much more. That is why we were surprised to see the P-6860FX run for 1 hour and 58 minutes, which is very good battery life for a notebook of this size. As always, the battery life can be stretched even further by dimming the display and such, but this was the time we netted during our DVD run-down test.
The P-6860FX comes with a large 9-cell battery that sticks out the back of the unit about an inch, but delivers good battery life
Gateway has made an amazingly affordable gaming notebook with the P-6860FX. Like we said before, most gaming notebooks cost and arm and a leg, but at just $1,349 the P-6860FX is a remarkable bargain that delivers excellent performance. The only complaints we have are very minor, which include its relatively slow processor and its counter-intuitive volume buttons, but that’s about it. Just remember it’s only available at Best Buy, so if you want more information about it you have to visit the retail portion of Gateway’s website.
Pros:
• Fantastic value
• Great for gaming
• Tons of storage and outputs/ports
• Good battery life
Cons:
• Soft-touch volume controls are counter-intuitive
• Semi-sluggish CPU
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by Spacemanbob on June 30, 2008:
“I was really skeptical about buying a Gateway Laptop, but after looking at the hardware and the spare hard drive bay, I purchased it. This thing is fast and has responded to any game or application I have put on it. So far I am running Age of Conan at...” More...