Gateway SX2800-01r Value PC

t's shaping up to be quite a rumble at the $500 value-PC price point, as the Gateway SX2800-01 ($500 as of December 13, 2009) offers performance nearly identical to that of the $520 hp pavilion a6710t and the $499 accer veriton xt270. However, while the SX2800-01 has a slight advantage over those PCs in general performance, Gateway's compact and shiny desktop still falls victim to some of the same issues common to value pcs at this level.The SX2800-01 runs a 2.33GHz processor, which is slower than the chips in the Acer (2.8GHz Core 2 Duo) and HP (2.6-GHz Dual-Core), but it throws two additional cores into the mix. That's right: The SX2800-01 rocks an Intel Core 2 Quad Processor 8200, which helps the Gateway PC deliver stronger performance on applications that support the additional multithreading. The included 4GB of DDR3-800 memory also trumps the 2GB-to-3GB RAM offerings in the HP and Acer. Finally, the Gateway's storage capacity of 640GB is a monster amount for a system at this price, beating the paltry 160GB hard disk of the Acer and the 500GB found on HP's A6710t.Link...