Gateway FX530XG @ [H] Consumer

Jason_Wall

[H] Consumer Managing Editor
Joined
Jul 22, 2005
Messages
2,138
Gateway is back in the [H] Consumer offices. We've been evaluating computers from the company with the cow spots for nearly two years. In our first evals, we slammed them on their bulky OS images and bad drivers. They listened to us, and for a time were shipping the cleanest OS in the Tier I business. But Gateway is starting to slip...

In the past, Gateway systems have always performed well enough to overcome, or at least balance out, any deficiencies in the tech support, build quality, or other departments. This time around, however, we were very disappointed by the build quality and amount of bloatware, and that impression was bolstered by the lackluster tech support we received.

Thanks for reading!
 
That's too bad...a solid gaming machine that's marred by bloatware and crappy techs. It seems like you could get a really nice rig and not have to shell out a ton a cash...but there are too many issues to really warrant a solid recommendation. I mean, come on....video card drivers that are five revisions old...that's inexcusable for a "gaming" machine. I would definately have to agree with your conclusions.


Overall, very nice and enjoyable review. :)
 
I could be wrong, but the upper vid card appears to be an X1950XT, and not an X1950XTX. Afaik there are no 1950XTX versions with the XT hairdryer reference cooler. The lower vid card, on the other hand, appears to be a 1950XTX with a reference cooler, although some manufacturers have adopted this cooler for the XT as well. If you haven't already returned the system you could always check the cards again.

Last time I was in New Orleans the female taxi driver called me "ma'am" all the way from the airport to the hotel, despite the growth in my face. Maybe bearded women are common in that area...
 
love starting my morning off with these evals. Thanks alot ma'am :D
 
I'm surprised that Tech Support got a 5 out of 10, ma'am.

I probably would have given it a 3 out of 10 or less, ma'am. But that's just me, ma'am.

Good review nonetheless, ma'am!
 
i laughed my ass off at the sims testing ma'am

We were able to run The Sims 2 with our Pets at 1600x1200 with full shadows and full AA at 55fps. In the screenshots we boxed our Sims into a small house on the front lawn and let all of them die so that the animals could take over the household. The only problem was the pets all ran away when the humans died. It was a sad day in Pleasantville.

great review ma'am!
 
It seems to me that a big reason the wiring was such a mess is because of the, for lack of a better word, moronic placement of the connectors. The ATX power, IDE, SATA, and front-panel ports are all at the back edge of the motherboard! I realize that the BTX-style wind-tunnel puts some constraints on connector placement, but come on!
 
I would like to point out that with such a high end machine that when running world of warcraft with vsync enabled your not going to see a performance decrease or increase depending on whether or not level of detail is enabled.

For example lets say you had left vsync off and you did the test with level of detail enabled and then disabled you would see a performance difference but due too the fact your running to very highend videocards in crossfire you would have still been above 80fps anyways.
 
I would like to point out that with such a high end machine that when running world of warcraft with vsync enabled your not going to see a performance decrease or increase depending on whether or not level of detail is enabled.

For example lets say you had left vsync off and you did the test with level of detail enabled and then disabled you would see a performance difference but due too the fact your running to very highend videocards in crossfire you would have still been above 80fps anyways.

D'oh! I should have disabled V-sync. I'll be sure to disable it on future tests and report back.

josh
 
brutal review for them.. and they were doing decent enough before! :(

ma'am :D i lol'd :p
 
Does V-Sync even matter on an LCD display? I heard it didnt.. or did I hear wrong?
 
$2500 w/o monitor? I guess if you are unable to assemble a pc...and have money to burn...and don't want a superior Nvidia graphics setup....and want poor technical support...yeah, then I guess it could be recommended. :D
 
Does anyone have a link they can provide that would help determine what I can safely remove from my startup in msconfig, like you guys did with the Gateway? I've got a Dell, so you know I've got stuff running I don't need, but I'd like to see a list of what I can safely disable/remove.
 
So did you ever hook up your ATI's?
Or did you run the testing with only one of them working?
 
Does V-Sync even matter on an LCD display? I heard it didnt.. or did I hear wrong?

On an LCD it does not matter as they don't "refresh" the display like a CRT does. An LCD's pixels just change color.
 
With Crossfire, you need one Master and one slave card, though you could certainly run two Master cards, like we saw in our review of the Overdrive PC awhile ago, but running one master and one slave is the preferred way of doing it, and these two cards are essentially the most high-end Crossfire setup possible.

But this configuration is a standard master/slave, with two "crossfire edition" 512MB cards.
 
Does anyone have a link they can provide that would help determine what I can safely remove from my startup in msconfig, like you guys did with the Gateway? I've got a Dell, so you know I've got stuff running I don't need, but I'd like to see a list of what I can safely disable/remove.

To be honest, I uncheck everything on my home system. I have never run into any problems. If you do, just boot into safe mode, and re-check whatever you unchecked.
 
Josh I think you missed the point. If I bought a system that was supposed to have two 1950 XTX in it no way in hell getting ONE 1950 XT and ONE 1950 XTX would be acceptable. Sure they are same essentially but the different clock speeds matter and the testing is supposed to be different for the different speed cards. You basically are getting a lower end card with the 1950 XT vs the 1950 XTX. Honestly thats pretty shady to me to pass that off to the customer.
 
The upper card may be an X1900 CF edition (master), like in Josh's second link. I can't find any master cards based on the 1950XT. The lower card is a regular X1950XTX acting as the slave.

The X1950XTX is not that similar to the other hi-end X19xx cards, it has GDDR4 memory instead of GDDR3 and a more efficient and quiet cooler. If I ordered a 1950XTX CF setup, I certainly wouldn't accept a slower master card with a cooler that drives you insane.
 
You are right, the white card is the Crossfire edition and the red card is the slave. I don't know why I thought it was the opposite.

Now that I look back at the configuration pageI'm surprised they didn't just ship us two X1950 XT cards. It doesn't say anything about different flavors of cards on the configuration page at all. It just says "You selected the ATI Radeon X1950 XT, so must also select ATI Radeon X1950 CrossFire Ed. 512MB, Dual DVI, VGA Support. (CRC05920)."
 
they both say crossfire Ed. in the actual little box for them... the tool tip is retarded :p

Man... gateway confuses me. my brain hurts :p
 
V-Sync does matter for LCDs. If it is not enabled, you will still get screen tearing, which defeats the purposes of maintaining high image quality along with your high frame rate.
 
V-Sync does matter for LCDs. If it is not enabled, you will still get screen tearing, which defeats the purposes of maintaining high image quality along with your high frame rate.


I was talking in the context of framerate, but you are correct it eliminates tearing. I haven't been posting very well today :eek:
 
No problem. I found it to be an interesting review since it is the exact same box I am using now, except that I opted for 4 GB RAM and the dual Raptor hard drive option.
 
410 page file for 67 processes? A friend of mine shows 937 for 45 processes...could that be a sign of some malware or virus?
 
410 page file for 67 processes? A friend of mine shows 937 for 45 processes...could that be a sign of some malware or virus?

Not necessarily. It all depends on the apps. Photoshop, for example, takes a huge bite out of the page file.

If he has that on a first boot situation, then he's got some hefty stuff in his startup routine.
 
All of you talking about the two different cards:
They actually ARE OF THE SAME MODEL!
The reason why one has a different kind of heatsink is that it wouldnßt be physically possible to fit the upper card with the longer exhaust due to space constraints. They already modified the chassis to allow for some of kind of airflow above the card, but since in a BTX chassis there would be no slot above the card the long cooler wouldn´t work very well.

I don´t know why this detail escaped you when other sites who tested this rig (or similar configs) clearly marked this out, you can verify this when you pull one card and check your ati driver.
I´m almost 100% sure you´ll find that both cards report as the same model.

Edit: and the upped card has to be the crossfire card since this is a BTX board, not an ATX. you´ve probably seen to many inverted ATX cases by now :D
 
Okay folks, the two video cards are the same - the XTX. The difference is that the cooler unit used on the bottom card won't FIT, so they used the old cooler. They're the same card.

By the way, this is why they can't fit an 8800 GTX in there - not enough room. They could conceivably fit one in the bottom slot, but that's only a PCI-E x4 slot :eek: . That's why the 8800s aren't available yet from Gateway.
 
so what are your thoughts on the machine? Similar to ours or different?

My thoughts are pretty similar. When I ordered from them, what I actually did was to apply for their credit card online first so that I could take advantage of 6 month zero interest on the purchase. I submitted the application without incident, and I actually received a call on December 31, 2006 from a sales rep to hash out the details of an order over the phone.

This was a cool experience because I had the name and phone number of a sales rep along with their direct extension and e-mail address in the event I had questions (of which I had several). The e-mail responses were always complete within 24 hours. Also, which may be of interest, in talking with the sales rep, I was able to get additional bundles and discounts not available on the web, which was cool. (Upgraded version of office, McAfee, and 3 yr support with on-site for no additional charge)

Due to the order request right after a holiday, the build time was 4 weeks. Long, but understandable.

When I tried to connect the Crossfire dongle (the worst piece of engineering I have seen in a long time), it didn't fit tightly (only one side would tighten). In working with it, the receptacle on the CE card socket actually unscrewed and got stuck to the dongle. So I called tech support.

First problem, the manual references a phone number for CS that is not an 800#, so watch out. Having said that, the answer was pretty much immediate (vs. Alienware with 10+ minute hold times). Like your experience, there was a lot of silence and referencing. However, the person was polite and professional the entire time. Due to the physical defect and the fact I have on-site warranty, they scheduled a replacement dongle (wrong solution to this problem - technically a new video card normally would have been the problem) along with a technician.

I received e-mail updates through the process and eventually received a call to setup a service window (approximately two hours). Unfortunately, the on-site is outsourced (Unisys) and the tech blew the window without any notification.

In waiting about a week for this to play out, I fixed the dongle, screwed the receptacle back into the video card, and hooked the dongle back as best I could and turned the computer on. It has been running fine ever since, so I canceled the on-site appointment.

IMO, high-end systems are completely brand new to Gateway, and at this point, every incident is a new world for them. Which, while frustrating, is fine because the warranty is good and I have no doubt they will replace any defective part expediently.

I agree that I was stunned upon the first boot into Windows. After running their BigFix utility a few times, it seems to have limited value (no updates that are materially different from what is found with Microsoft Update). McAfee seems to be working fine after some tweaking. It is new to me, but they threw in a free 3 yr package, so I might as well make full use of it.

Gaming performance is good. Crossfire requires hand holding though. In some games, there are audio glitches that are related to whether or not Catalyst AI is enabled or disabled. Newer games prefer to have Catalyst AI enabled and some older games must have it disabled. Aside from that, the system is rock solid and with the Raptors, pretty snappy as well.

The all-in-one media reader is useless to me, so those constraints don't bother me, but the implementation decision is puzzling (USB 1.x). I haven't popped the lid yet. At some point, I'll probably upgrade the video system. But in most direct x 9 games, Crossfire = a single 8800 GTX.
 
Okay folks, the two video cards are the same - the XTX. The difference is that the cooler unit on the bottom card won't FIT, so they used the old cooler. They're the same card.

By the way, this is why they can't fit an 8800 GTX in there - not enough room. They could conceivably fit one in the bottom slot, but that's only a PCI-E x4 slot :eek: . That's why the 8800s aren't available yet from Gateway.

OK, thanks for the clarification - good thing I was wrong. However, by using the XT reference cooler they created a significant noise problem. They should have used another third-party cooler, e.g. Accelero X2.
 
OK, thanks for the clarification - good thing I was wrong. However, by using the XT reference cooler they created a significant noise problem. They should have used another third-party cooler, e.g. Accelero X2.

I don't think we've ever seen a Tier I use an after-market cooler, and it's doubtful we'll ever see it. The ATI cards have variable fan speeds, so they can certainly get loud if the GPU gets warm, but in general use, they're rather quiet.
 
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