Solid performance and a great array of peripherals make the Gateway Select 1100 an excellent choice for mainstream users with a hunger for power.
Thanks to a host of top-notch peripherals and excellent overall performance, Gateway has done a good job making its Select 1100 Deluxe stand out from the bulk of the 1.1GHz Athlon crowd. It may not be the best of bunch but it's certainly on the podium.
On almost every benchmark test, the system scores very well -- it's not the fastest on any particular one, but manages to come within nodding distance of the similarly equipped performance front-runner every time. The only exception is on Quake 3D Arena, where the Select 1100 performs well, but not nearly as well as a Pentium 4-based system with the same Radeon ATI 4x AGP w/TVout card and 64MB of double data rate memory.
When we powered up the system for the first time we found ourselves face-to-face with five ad links on the lower right side of the screen: two for Gateway, three for third-party Web sites. They're easy to remove, just change the Windows background image. However, at almost AU$4,000, the Select 1100 shouldn't need to be subsidised by ads. We're picking a nit, but we feel it's a valid one.
The bigger picture is much better, and literally bigger than average: 17-inches as measured by the viewing area on Gateway's EV700 monitor. This is one of the best displays Gateway has offered. It's relatively flat with great colour and there's a little button on the front, aside from the usual controls, labeled "Fine Picture Mode." It's used to enhance the picture quality and works only moderately for graphics. It seems to add more depth to a video image. If you're wondering why we've fixated on the monitor, it's because most of what this system offers is centreed around the visual. Unlike many of its competitors, it comes equipped with a Hauppage WinTV PCI TV Tuner Card. Not only does it let you watch TV (and listen to FM radio), but you can also capture frames and motion video.
What would all of those sights be without sound? Fortunately the Select 1100 is up to the task with its five-piece Boston Acoustics digital speaker system. The four satellites are just about wafer thin and put out reasonable sound by themselves. When you add in the subwoofer, the system shakes walls. It's one of the best speaker systems we've heard.
With everything that's included, there's not much to add to the Select 1100. Then again, there's not much expansion room in the midtower case, which is smaller than many of its high-performance competitors. One accessible and two internal 3.5 inch bays are unoccupied. There is only one PCI slot available on this ISA-less motherboard, located right alongside the graphics card in the AGP slot. The graphics card's heat sink makes it a tight squeeze, but we were still able to fit a FireWire PCI card into the vacant slot, which is fortunate since the Select 1100 doesn't include IEEE 1394 (FireWire).
We're certainly not disappointed with Gateway's Select 1100 Deluxe, but a less discretionary onsite service plan and a FireWire interface would make us feel a lot happier.
Gateway Select 1100 Athlon 1.1GHz
Company:Gateway Australia
Ph:1300 302 315
Price: Base price AU$3,999 with 128MB memory and CD/RW AU$4,503
Rating:
8%
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