Digital Trends

Gateway FX6800-01e December 1st, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Features and Design

The FX6800 is Gateway's first machine to pick up the Intel's next-generation Core i7 processor, a brutally fast quad-core chip that handles eight threads simultaneously through the rebirth of Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. Though the technology seemed to die with the company's Pentium 4 desktop processors, Intel has promised a drastic increase in speed from it that time around, along with a handful of other refinements. The FX6800-01e gets the 920 model of the chip, which is clocked at 2.66GHz. Though the desktop only sports 3GB of RAM - a departure from the usual 4GB found in most gaming systems - Gateway has designed it that way to mate well with the the i7 chips three channels for memory (1GB on each channel). And it's blazing fast DDR3 RAM, clocked at 1066MHz. On the GPU front, the FX6800 uses ATI's top-shelf Radeon HD 4850, which includes 512MB of onboard DDR3 RAM and offers dual DVI outputs, along with S-video. Gateway also provides a 750GB SATA II hard drive.

In the spirit of making the FX6800 a true-blue gaming rig, Gateway has given it a tasteful dose of edgy styling on the outside. Like the FX notebook that also bears Gateway's performance branding, the company has shined up many of the exterior panels in piano black, and trimmed others in a burnt metallic orange. Though some faux carbon fiber makes an appearance behind the "FX" letters on the front, Gateway has thankfully been more sparing with it and left it off all other parts of the PC. Two other gaming PC staples, a window to show off the guts and interior neon lights, are also absent - which can be either a bane or boon depending on your tastes. We preferred the more conservative approach, and didn't think it looked too out of place in an office, which tends to be a good measure of overall gaudiness.

To keep the outside looking clean, many ports and connectors on the face have been hidden behind slide-away panels. The microphone jack, headphone jack, and a FireWire port, for instance, have been hidden behind a bay that pivots out from below the power button. We liked the concept, but Gateway could have done a better job executing some of the doors, which felt too cheap to function reliably. The featherweight door that hid the lower two hot-swappable eSATA bays rattled to the touch and tended to snag on the close, while the pop-up top hatch for the 15-in-1 media reader suffered the opposite problem: It was so firm, we had to really slam it in to get it to open.

The FX6800 also has an interesting media control array built into its very top bay. With power off, it looks like another black plank, but powered on, a grid of orange lights pop out from below. This makes them inconspicuous, but also less convenient to operate. For us, the glare on the glossy panel made them difficult to read from above, so we had to bend down to the cases level to get a better look, then carefully select the option since the lack of separation between options and lack of tactile feedback makes it easy to select the wrong one. Since the included keyboard offers nearly all the same controls, these inconveniences pretty much negate the usefulness of the on-box controls altogether. 

Accessories

Though Gateway includes a keyboard, mouse and speakers with the FX6800-01e, all feel like relatively cheap Logitech knock-offs. The keyboard, especially, has a very lightweight feel to it that doesn't exactly exude quality. The mouse runs along the same line (with a left button that developed a squeak in only one day), and the coffee-cup-sized speakers predictably lack much punch at all. In their defense, though, all three accessories do the job well enough, and will make do for buyers who don't already own better-quality peripherals to hook the desktop to.

Image Courtesy of Gateway