Gateway Performance 1700XL
The Gateway Performance 1700XL is an Intel-based machine featuring a Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor and 256MB of RDRAM and a 40GB Quantum Fireball hard disk drive which was pretty much the standard sized hard drive in this roundup. The Gateway has a beautiful case, which is both attractive and strong. The thing we love about Gateway machines is that they are really easy to upgrade. Inside the Gateway were some very interesting locks that keep all the drives secured into place. There were sliding locks for all the 5.25in and 3.5in drive bays. This means that no screws are needed to secure any of the 5.25in or 3.5in drives, even though Gateway did use one screw to hold each of the 5.25 and 3.5 in drives in place. There was also a card lock at the back of the machine that keeps the AGP and all the PCI cards in place. To pull out any of the cards, you need to pull back on the card lock. (Note: none of the cards were secured into place by single screws but rather held together by the card lock, which incidentally uses one screw to singlehandedly secure all the cards.) Inside the case was a fairly cluttered interior. All the cables and wires could have been tied up and tucked away a little better. There are three PCI cards fitted to this machine. One PCI slot was taken up by the SoundBlaster Live sound card the other by the 56K data/fax/voice modem and the third by a two-port IEEE 1394 FireWire panel. The Gateway also features a single FireWire port on the front of the case and there is also provision for two USB ports. We also noticed that Gateway (like Pioneer Computers) installed four 64MB memory modules. This will obviously limit the expandability of this machine. Gateway decided to use the Intel D850GB motherboard which proved to be somewhat a popular choice with those submitting P4 machines. You can have up to 2GB of RAM in this machine if you use four 512MB modules. The only thing we noticed in the past (with this motherboard in particular) is that you don't have many settings to alter to improve the performance of your PC.
The Gateway included an LG CED-8120B CD-RW recorder. It can burn conventional CDs at 12x and burn re-recordable CDs at 8x. In our CD-R/DVD Playback test were able to successfully burn an audio CD and watch a DVD movie (though with some slight pauses and jerkiness). As soon as the burner started to close off one of the 13 tracks, the DVD player would stop responding. The sound would go out and the picture would suddenly freeze. These interruptions were very short and once the burner started copying the next track onto the CD the DVD player would once again operate as normal. The Gateway came with a 16x DVD player and Boston Acoustic BA735 digital speakers. These were great little speakers, and they were backed by a subwoofer. We recently found out these speakers are only available through specific Gateway packages but draw upon the same technology and quality of Boston's retail line.
The Gateway Performance 1700XL is slightly let down is by its monitor and graphics card. The monitor only has a 15.9in viewable area and its picture quality didn't impress us. The graphics card was based around nVidia's Geforce 2 Ultra processor. This is a fast card but not as fast as the all new Geforce 3 which, we saw blow the competition away in 3D.
The Gateway PC performed exceptionally well in Content Creation Winstone. It was actually the second fastest overall and the fastest P4 based machine. It did just as well in Business Winstone, and in WinBench 2D Business and High-End Graphics its performed just as well as the other machines that shipped with Geforce 2 Ultra cards (but a little bit slower in all the 3D benchmarks).
Gateway Performance 1700XL
Company: Gateway Australia
Ph: 1300 302 952
Price: AU$5,146
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