Gateway 7510GX Review (pics, specs)

by Dustin Sklavos, California USA

Introduction and Overview

Notebook shopping over the past year has become complex to say the least. When I entered the desktop replacement market to find a new computer to use for, well, everything, it was daunting. Most notebooks these days have the same specifications, and those specs are rarely exactly what you wanted.

At some point the research gets to be too much and you just go to the stores to browse, and that's where I found the Gateway 7000 series. Fully-featured notebooks at very competitive prices; the only thing about them that gave me pause was the Gateway brand, which I (and I'm sure many other consumers) have had a poor impression of in the past. I came to this site and investigated and found that yes, by and large, Gateways aren't really synonymous with quality - except for this series.

The specifications of the Gateway 7510GX follow, and I will try to be as thorough for the other technophiles as possible and break down the technical information.

• Processor: Mobile Athlon 64 3700+ Processor,2.4 GHz,Socket 754,1MB L2 Cache,90nm San Diego Core (includes SSE3 instruction set),1600MHz HyperTransport
• Motherboard Chipset: ATI Radeon Xpress 200 (RS480) Chipset,SB400 Southbridge,Conexant AC'97 Audio Controller,AC'97 Modem Controller
• Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X600 Graphics,128MB Dedicated VRAM on a 128-bit bus,128MB Shared HyperMemory,PCI Express x16 Bus,Core 400MHz, memory 260MHz (520MHz Effective)
• Memory/RAM: 1024MB DDR333 PC2700 SDRAM,Two 512MB Samsung modules,2.5-3-3-7 timings,Expandable to 1.5GB
• Hard Drive: 100GB 4200rpm Hard Disk,Fujitsu MHU2100AT,8MB Cache,UATA-100 Interface
• Screen: 15.4" WXGA UltraBright Display (1280x800x32)
• Optical Drive: Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW Drive fromLG Electronics,Write Speeds: 2.4x Dual Layer DVD+R, 8x DVD+/-R, 4x DVD+/-RW, 24x CD-R, 10x CD-RW,Read Speeds: 24x CD-ROM, 8x DVD-ROM, 3x DVD-RAM (I can't find any confirmation of whether or not this unit can write to DVD-RAM, but I believe it can. The comparable model on LG's website can, but I can't confirm this one)
• 6-in-1 Media Reader:Secure Digital, Multimedia Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Compact Flash, Micro Drive
• Wireless: Broadcom 802.11g Wireless Ethernet Adapter
• LAN: Marvell Yukon PCI-E 10/100 Wired Ethernet Controller
• Ports:4x USB 2.0, 1x 4-pin FireWire (IEEE1394), 1x S-Video Out, 1x VGA Out, 1x Mic, 1x Headphone, 1x Type II PCMCIA
• Windows XP Home with SP2

Reasons For Buying And The Subsequent Purchase

I was looking to consolidate my desktop and notebook into one unit that I could take with me wherever I needed to. I'm a student filmmaker, and I also use my notebook for my job, so I needed something that was as fully-featured as possible while still being a fairly reasonable size and having some semblance of battery life. I play computer games every now and then and needed something that could actually perform reasonably.

The vast majority of notebooks in my price range were either Centrino notebooks with only 512MB of RAM and GMA900 (or worse, Intel Extreme Graphics Decellerator 2) or Pentium 4 notebooks. Not mobile P4. Desktop. Forget it, part of the reason for switching away from the desktop was because I didn't want a space heater anymore.

I needed something that could keep up with an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro (I do miss that All-in-Wonder, the one crucial sacrifice for switching to a notebook).

While shopping around I came perilously close to settling on the HP zv6000, which I still submit is a hell of a deal, but I was hung up on the graphics core. While the Radeon Xpress 200M with 128MB dedicated memory is the best integrated graphics you can buy (though at what point do you really differentiate between integrated and discrete when the "integrated" GPU has its own VRAM?), it's just not fast enough. My main criterion with the graphics core was that it be able to play Doom 3; not necessarily for Doom 3's sake, but for futureproofing's sake.

I looked at Dells for a little while but I'm not sure even Dell knows what the prices are on its notebooks considering how many coupons and sales and savings fly around, and I personally don't care for the brand. I like Toshiba, but Toshiba's notebooks are overpriced and underpowered these days. Sony and Fujitsu were likewise overpriced; I was examining an Vaio S360 for a while before I realized if I was going to replace my desktop, a 13.3" screen wasn't going to cut it.

Ultimately, nothing else really caught my eye until I saw the 7426GX at Best Buy. The price on it was a little steep ($1,549) and considering my reservations about the brand, the extended warranty finally pushed it out of my range. Then I saw an open box 7422GX, grabbed it for $1196, plus $250 for extended warranty. That worked pretty well, but the USB ports, at least in the back, kept acting screwy (something you can attribute either to the VIA chipset in the system or just faulty hardware). When the 7510GX was released not long after for a ridiculous sale price of $1,249 (that's $300 LESS than the 7426GX model it succeeds), I made the exchange.

I immediately brought it home, unwrapped it, made my recovery media first thing, then reformatted it and made it mine. Since that point it has been serving me well and I've been using it to play computer games (primarily Doom 3) and edit my student film (the wallpaper for which is depicted on the screen below).

The Gateway 7510GX in all its glory, screen wallpaper from author's student film(view larger image)

Build & Design

If there's anything to say about the 7510GX appearance-wise, it sure isn't a looker. Decked out in boring black with a boring silver hood, it might be the least exciting looking notebook ever. Even the Gateway logo looks a bit cheap. The nice thing, though, is that it isn't really gaudy either, just dull. But I didn't buy it for looks, I bought it for personality.

Credit where credit is due, though: the texture of the surface of the notebook, under the keyboard, is a bit unique. Plastic, for sure, but could be mistaken for rubber without closer scrutiny, and is actually quite soft and comfortable.

The system itself feels fairly sturdy. There are horror stories about the hinges of 7000 series laptops floating all over the forums here (pick up that extended warranty!), but that appears to be a superficial problem that doesn't affect the machine itself.

There is some flex and give of the plastic shell of the unit; it doesn't seem inherently fragile, but it also doesn't seem like the sturdiest notebook in the world either.

The screen is actually fairly firm with little wobble if any. There is, however, a decent amount of flex to the shell of it, with some moderate rippling.

Heatwise, the unit is remarkably cool; cooler than the 7422GX it replaced. The fan spins up fairly infrequently and is actually pretty quiet. The underside gets pretty warm, but never outright hot. The only curiosity is that the shell of the screen, below the LCD, actually gets hot. You won't burn yourself, but it's not comfortably cool either. But seeing as how you're never going to sit there with your fingers pressed against it, it's more a curiosity than anything.

The system is about 7 or 8 pounds, close to 9 with the AC adaptor. It's really about where it should be in its class; it's not too heavy but it's not exactly light either. I have a backpack for it so it's not a big deal to me.

Overall, the build is solid if utterly unspectacular.

Screen

And what a screen. 1280x800 with Gateway's glossy BrightView. More prone to glare from other light sources, but also prone to looking totally sweet. The screen is surprisingly attractive for what is essentially a sub-budget notebook. It came with no dead pixels, which was a major fear of mine. The open box 7422GX I had didn't have any either - food for thought, those of you getting sick or scared of dead pixels.

The screen's plenty bright enough and the lighting is even. If there are any problems with it, I can't tell.

Very impressive.

Speakers and Sound

Power lights and a pair of very impressive little speakers (view larger image)

As with any notebook I have to recommend buying external speakers or headphones. However, for what it's worth, the speakers in this unit are surprisingly rich and clear. Somewhat tinny and lacking bass, as you would expect, but also quite loud. Unusually loud for notebook speakers, in fact. To wit: I usually have the master volume set at 25%. That's impressive to me.

I would actually say the sound quality is better than most budget speakers and is quite livable. If you're going to buy external speakers or headphones, buy good ones. I bought a $30 pair of 2.1 Altec Lansings that sounded exponentially worse than these speakers. For what it's worth, I listen to my music, do my video editing, and play my games using these integrated speakers and have found them to be very acceptable.

The machine itself can't be described as "whisper quiet," but it's very close. There's a single fan that rarely spins up, which is impressive, because as I said earlier, the unit never actually gets hot. The clicking of the hard disk is also sometimes audible, but almost all of this is easily masked by just playing music.

Really, a very quiet machine.

Processor and Performance

Boot time is unholy with the crap this unit comes preinstalled with, but after reformatting with a spare copy of Windows XP Professional I found the boot time to be a fairly reasonable 30 seconds or so.

The real killer of performance in this machine that keeps it from the realm of "absolutely ridiculous" and in the realm of "quite livable" is the painfully slow hard disk. It's livable, and the 1GB of RAM goes a long way towards alleviating the problem, but heaven help you if you get stuck using the swap file.

However, when you're doing anything that doesn't require you to wait for the hard disk, it's FAST. Render times on Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro are stellar, and real-time is equally impressive. For example, on my old Athlon XP 2500+, a scene using a particular effect would have to constantly pause and re-render frames when shuttled through on the timeline. On this unit? Shuttling is fluid.

Beyond that, there are complaints that the processor underclocks to 800 MHz on the battery. Yes, that's 800 MHz, but that's 800 MHz on an Athlon 64. Believe me when I say it's still a solid performer.

Gaming performance is another story. The 7422GX had a Mobility Radeon 9600 64MB that was sort of cute and respectable, and it tried real hard and for the most part succeeded. I could play UT2K4 at native resolution and that was fine by me. It struggled badly with the end boss of Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, but up until that point was okay.

And now we have the PCI Express Mobility Radeon X600 128MB, which is every bit as disappointing as the desktop part. This core is tired and has been used and reused to death. All this GPU is, is a Mobility Radeon 9700 with HyperMemory. Call it on what it is. On older games and older benchmarks, this is indistinguishable from a Mobility Radeon 9600 at similar clocks.

The extra memory does go a long way, though. Doom 3 becomes much more playable (moving up a full resolution and quality setting), and everything else I've thrown at it has run swimmingly.

For what it's worth, the GPU is capable, the video RAM is plenty, and it'll probably last you a while. But the HyperMemory is unexciting when a core like this is really more comfortable with 128MB of VRAM anyhow, and it's just not fast enough to properly handle 256MB worth of data.

BENCHMARKS

Benchmarks? I've run a few.

3DMark2001 Score: 12325

3DMark2005 Results

3DMark05 Scores	Gateway 7510GX (2.4 GHz)	Fujitsu N3510 (1.73 GHz)
3DMark Score	16643DMarks	721 3D Marks
CPU Score	3778 CPUMarks	3242 CPUMarks
Gaming Tests
GT1 - Return To Proxycon	7.2FPS	3.7 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest	5.0FPS	1.8 FPS
GT3 - Canyon Flight	8.2FPS	3.5 FPS
CPU Tests
CPU Test 1	1.9 FPS	1.6 FPS
CPU Test 2	3.4FPS	2.9 FPS

PCMark04 Scores	Gateway 7510GX (2.4 GHz)	Sony VAIO FS680 (1.86 GHz)	Sony VAIO S380 (1.86 GHz)	Fujitsu N3510 (1.73 GHz)
Multithreaded Test 1 / File Compression	3.352MB/s	3.25MB/s	3.366MB/s	3.24 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / File Encryption	35.689MB/s	25.66MB/s	27.667MB/s	25.58 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / File Decompression	28.758 MB/s	22.37 MB/s	24.104 MB/s	22.72 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Processing	14.302MPixels/s	10.38MPixels/s	11.046MPixels/s	10.03 MPixels/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Virus Scanning	2018.620MB/s	1738.85 MB/s	1726.7 MB/s	1752.97 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Grammar Check	3.374KB/s	2.67KB/s	2.876KB/s	2.8 KB/s
File Decryption	72.442MB/s	51.49MB/s	55.425MB/s	51.45 MB/s
Audio Conversion	3071.085KB/s	2368.23KB/s	2552.67KB/s	2346.96 KB/s
Web Page Rendering	5.383Pages/s	5.20Pages/s	5.693Pages/s	5.25 Pages/s
DivX Video Compression	62.789FPS	48.24FPS	47.043FPS	46.08 FPS
Physics Calculation and 3D	196.298FPS	155.63FPS	166.72FPS	168.02 FPS
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines	1029.513FPS	449.86FPS	478.29FPS	1486.18 FPS

PCMark 04 Final Score: 4187

Doom 3 v1.3*

• 640x480, Low Quality52.7 fps
• 640x480, High Quality40.6 fps
• 800x600, Medium Quality36.4 fps
• 800x600, High Quality33.9 fps
• 1024x768, Low Quality17.9 fps
• 1024x768, Medium Quality17.4 fps

*The first run of the Doom 3 benchmark is never a good, valid run, because it loads in textures from the HD on the fly. The second run is with all textures in memory. I used the second run for each of these numbers. Also, the game recommends 800x600 High Quality, which would mark the first time I've seen Doom 3 overestimate hardware instead of underestimate it.

Unreal Tournament 2004 v3355*
DM-Icetomb

• 1024x768, no AA/AF44.8 fps
• 1024x768, no AA, 8x AF33.0 fps
• 1024x768, 2x AA, 8x AF29.3 fps

DM-Inferno

• 1024x768, no AA/AF50.1 fps
• 1024x768, no AA, 8x AF41.2 fps
• 1024x768, 2x AA, 8x AF37.3 fps

*Run with all settings in game set to highest quality. AF set to quality.

Aquamark 3 Score:28062

HD Tune Scores

HD Tune Benchmarks	Gateway 7510GX (Fujitsu 4200 RPM, 100GB)	Sony VAIO FS680(4200 RPM)
Minimum Transfer Rate	15.5MB/sec	6.9MB/sec
Maximum Transfer Rate	30.6 MB/sec	30.3 MB/sec
Average Transfer Rate	24.8 MB/sec	22.7MB/sec
Acess Time	20.1ms	20.0ms
Burst Rate	58.6 MB/sec	-
CPU Usage	5.6%

Using Super PI to calculate Pi to 2 million digits of accuracy resulted in1m31s. Realize this is a full eight seconds faster than the Gateway7426GX, which had a Mobile Athlon 64 3700+, likely using an older core.

Notebook	Time to Calculate Pi to 2 Million Digits
Gateway 7510GX (AMD Mobile Athlon 64 3700+ Processor,2.4 GHz)	1m 31s
Sony VAIO FS680 (1.86 GHz Alviso Pentium M)	1m 53s
IBM ThinkPad T43 (1.86 GHz Alviso Pentium M)	1m 45s
Fujitsu LifeBook N3510 (1.73 GHz Alviso Pentium M)	1m 48s
Dell Inspiron 6000D (1.6 GHz Alviso Pentium M)	1m 52s
Dell Inspiron 600M (1.6 GHzDothan Pentium M)	2m 10s
Sony VAIO S360(1.7 GHzDothan Pentium M)	1m 57s
Sony VAIO S170P(1.5 GHzDothan Pentium M)	2m 07s
Sony VAIO S380 (1.86 GHz Alviso Pentium M)	1m 42s

Keyboard And Touchpad

The curiously awkward keyboard and troublesome touchpad (view larger image)

I've found the keyboard to be very comfortable and responsive. Keys are a little bit stiff, but there's very little flex if any. The keyboard is really quite solid and easy to use, but the layout is still sort of screwy bordering on downright bizarre. If you look at the bottom of the keyboard, you'll see the Fn to the left of Ctrl, when it should be at right. Worse, the spacebar is rather short, with some of its space being occupied by an unnecessary duplicate key. Scroll lock is a regular key but num lock needs you to hold the Fn key.

The touchpad is awful, no real way to describe it, and I'm convinced it's a design flaw because the old 7422GX's touchpad wasn't any better. The surface isn't smooth and I find my fingertip sticking a bit and sort of rubbing against it instead of gliding. Some of the trouble can be alleviated by maximizing the pad sensitivity and disabling unnecessary features, but ultimately you're just better off buying a USB mouse. More than that, I don't know if scrollbars on other notebooks are like this, but the scrollbar on this is almost impossible to control properly. It's so much easier to just reach over and press "Page Up" or "Page Down" or even just use the arrow keys.

My biggest beef is with the shortcut keys at the top of the unit, which are impossible to configure. The volume up and down keys do in fact turn the volume up or down, but you only know by the sound; there's no display. Mercifully, the shortcut keys default to useful things (the music note opens your music software, the e-mail button opens your e-mail software, the "i" opens your web browser, and the magnifying glass button opens a "find" dialog box.)

What I can't fathom is the omission of a mute key from anywhere on the unit. It's not a Fn function, it just plain doesn't exist. I don't understand why I'd need a "dimmer switch" that turns off the lights on the unit, making all...what, four, five small blue LEDs invisible...but mute? That's for suckers!

Do yourself a favor and download one of the myriad freeware programs available that lets you set up hotkeys for volume control and actually has an on-screen display.

Input and Output Ports

Okay, so the keyboard isn't "fully featured." It's a good thing the rest of the computer is. We've got a sweet core, a playable GPU, a huge hard disk, plenty of RAM, now we want to connect crap to our computer. And we can.

Connections to pretty much anything you need short of bluetooth and ExpressCard54 (view larger image)

Every other useful connection (view larger image)

Four USB 2.0 ports (two on the back, two on the left side), which is extremely convenient. Then the 4-pin FireWire port on the left side is very handy (especially for movie geeks like me). The S-Video on the back produces a serviceable picture on your TV set, and then there are the usual suspects of ethernet and modem jacks, a VGA port, and mic and headphone jacks. I do take issue with the mic and headphone jacks being on the back of the unit, though, which just doesn't make any sense at all. Why not the front right side, which has plenty of real estate? All there is on the right side is the optical drive.

The 6-in-1 media reader on the left side has proven handy, reading every common form of flash, and I'm sure I'll have to use the PC Card slot on the same side someday.

It's the four USB 2.0 ports plus the FireWire that make this one gravy for me.

Wireless

The unit comes with a Broadcom 802.11g wireless adaptor that, on the packaging, swears up and down there's a "125MB High Speed Mode" which I have yet to bear witness to. The wireless range on the unit is, unfortunately, somewhat poor, but on the bright side I have yet to be dropped by it, so at least it's stable.

I live in a two room apartment and the wireless router is set up in the living room in the center of the apartment. The router is a high-end 802.11g 108Mbps Netgear. The fastest connection this thing's ever had to it has been 54Mbps - 802.11g spec - but averages around 36MBps from my room. At the moment it's down to 24MBps. Still plenty, but somewhat disappointing.

The unit does not include Bluetooth, which is fine by me. Bluetooth's relevance is continually disputed, but I personally have yet to have had a need for it, so it doesn't matter to me. If it's a big deal for you, buy a USB dongle for it.

Battery

The battery lasts 1:40 when playing a DVD at full brightness with no wireless. For average use, it typically lasts around 2:30. What's worth noting is that, as I mentioned before, the CPU downclocks to 800 MHz on the battery. Ultimately, though, this would be the absolutely fatal flaw of the unit: the battery life is mediocre. However, in fairness, compared to other desktop replacement models based around the Pentium 4, this battery life is stellar, it just can't keep up with Centrino based computers.

Of course, on the other hand, it does outperform most Centrino based computers in its class, so it's a question of whether or not you want to make the trade off.

Operating System and Software

The computer comes with Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2 and a small variety of software, most of which will only work for a limited time period. It comes with Microsoft Works & Money 2005, Nero 6 Suite (which is a stripped down version of Nero Burning ROM, my personal favorite CD/DVD writing software), PowerDVD (nice and preferable over WinDVD in my opinion), Microsoft Office 2003 Trial (60-day period), AOL 9 with 3-month trial period, Norton Internet Security 2005 (90-day trial), and McAfee AntiSpyware (30-day trial). Then there's a compliment of weird crap that comes with it, too, that I honestly do not know what it does. I never did care for time limited subscription based software.

For what it's worth, though, this thing is nowhere near as brutalized by unnecessary pack-in software as HP or Sony notebooks are (Sony's a real offender, my last notebook from them had Microsoft Money AND Quicken installed).

You have to make your own recovery media. When it was on my old $2,000 Sony, that was crap (even worse, they didn't even include the CD-Rs to make it), but this is a below-budget machine, so I don't take issue with it. What I do take issue with is how they only let you make one set of recovery media. And what's just plain weird is that the thing comes with 6 CD-Rs expressly for you to burn the media (but not enough to burn the individual app/driver discs), but gives you the option to burn it to DVD. Wouldn't it have just been simpler and cheaper to include the two DVD+Rs instead of the CD-Rs?

Customer Support

I haven't had to use the customer support, but it's my understanding that because this is a retail notebook, any problems I have I have to take up with Best Buy anyhow. My experiences with them have been surprisingly good (hence how I even got this machine in the first place), and usually they'll just take your word for it if you have a problem. The regular warranty is 90 days, so do yourself a favor and pay for the extended warranty, which'll bring the price of this thing up to where it ought to be anyhow. The $250 I spent on it was worth it for my peace of mind.

Gateway's site, however, is borderline worthless. The driver files they offer are inappropriate (if you can explain to me how an Intel chipset driver runs an AMD notebook, I'll give this thing to you); the sound driver doesn't even actually work. I wouldn't recommend this notebook to an average computer user, but if you're like me and you understand how this stuff works, you'll be fine. You'll get a little frustrated, but you'll figure it out.

Complaints

The randomly noisy optical drive (view larger image)

My main gripes have to do with the lack of power management software, lack of controls for the shortcut keys, lack of an on-screen display for the ones that are there, the poor keyboard layout, and the lack of a frigging mute key or shortcut. Additionally, the hard disk is slow and threatens to drag the whole thing down with it, and the Mobility Radeon X600, while more than serviceable, still just strikes me as being somewhat...tired...and the HyperMemory is completely unnecessary.

The optical drive also tends to be a bit noisy, and Gateway's site is abysmal. If you aren't capable of being your own tech support, this may not be the right computer for you.

But then I tell novices to buy Macs anyhow.

Praises

It may seem like I have a lot of issues with the computer, but part of that is because I feel as a consumer you should be informed of what you're getting into. This computer isn't perfect; in fact it's pretty generic. However, it runs and it runs well and stable, and what you get for the price is, in my opinion, downright obscene. They don't even make desktops with these specs at this price, and if you're comfortable being your own tech support, to say this is a steal would be understatement of the year.

The processor is a house, the GPU is - while a bit maligned by yours truly - really very capable, and the performance you get for what you pay just can't be ignored.

Conclusion

A few years ago Best Buy had its own like of computer hardware under the vprMatrix brand. When I was shopping for a monitor I noticed their vprMatrix was the only 17" on display that could run at 1600x1200. It was $200 with a $100 rebate. SOLD. I brought it home and found it was worth far more than that. The monitor didn't top out at 1600x1200. It topped out at 2048x1536. Bargain? You could say that.

The Gateway 7510GX is the notebook equivalent of that monitor. The HyperMemory, however inconsequential it is, isn't even advertised. Nor is the cooler-running 90nm San Diego core Mobile Athlon 64 3700+. And they don't mention that under the hood, they changed the VIA chipset that powered the 74xx series to an ATI Radeon Xpress 200, PCI-Express capable chipset. And it's at a price that downright shames the competition. All you have to do is take a chance on it. For the money you'd expect yesterday's technology, driven by a mediocre, problem ridden SiS chipset, not a brand new CPU core and a proven chipset by an up-and-comer in the chipset world.

From a design perspective, it seems whoever put this together managed to cram an absolute beast of a computer into this chassis, then got bored and gave up on the actual external design, leaving you with a boring-looking black box that conceals an ungodly amount of power. But if you're like me and you care more about the actual computer than its looks, this is the machine for you.

This thing shames the overpriced Dells, Sonys, Toshibas, Fujitsus, and Alienwares of the world. Take it and run while you still can.

 

Seems to me everything is really quite perfect as far as specs go, the benchmarks are really amazing and this is definitely the answer to the question "is there a budget gaming notebook?"

The 4200 RPM hard drive is the one let down. But as you say, boosting the RAM can solve that to a degree.

Great review!

 

Hey, great article man. I just ordered this notebook and it should be arriving soon. Did you order it online, or did you go pick it up from the store? The reason I ask is, because about every single 7510gx at the best buy stores (i checked out 3 different stores) has a 256 MB video card, rather then the 128 MB video card which it states. Im actually surprised that yours came with a 128mb video card.

 

I picked it up from the store.

The computer lists the memory as being 256MB because of the HyperMemory, but the actual VRAM is 128MB. There isn't any difference between any of the models.

 

Pulp,
Great review! I have been on the fence with this computer for a while now, I think that I am going to get it but will wait until it goes on sale again. (Hopefully, in a month as that seems to be the cycle.) Wish I would have read this before sunday and it would be mine! Also, any idea as to where to get an extra battery? I will probably buy one to combat the short battery life. Thanks again

 

Great review! I've got to say, this machine seems to me to do very well what the 7422/7426GX set out to do: be a budget gaming machine with punch, especially given the decent overclocking opportunities of the x600. Too bad about the hard drive, although I haven't noticed the problems with the touchpad you're describing on my 7422GX...

Also, to mute, press the "Vol up" and "Vol Down" buttons at the same time. Nifty little trick I found on Gateway's website for the 7422GX, so I imagine it works on this one, too.

 

tuckryan:

Even at the current asking price it's still a bargain for the power. You can run a search on Google to find places that sell batteries for it; alternatively, Gateway's site also has them, albeit they list under a different model but they ARE the right ones. They can be found here.

Thank you for the kind words.

lowlymarine:

I had no idea those buttons did that. Convenient! Unfortunately, though, the lack of on-screen display still leaves it somewhat sour, and I'll probably continue to use the program I've been using.

You may just be better suited to the touchpad than I am; I was using a touchpad on a Vaio for a while and that...was a nice touchpad.

The X600 unfortunately doesn't overclock well at all and I haven't been able to get more than 10MHz off the core and 20MHz off the VRAM. I've also read from other people on the boards here that they haven't been able to get a good overclock out of it, either. The reason for that is, I think, if you look up the X600 online, you'll notice the one in the 7510GX is actually running at near the highest spec for the part.

Thank you, as well, for the kind words.

 

Thx for that info Pulp, also thanks for posting where I can find the extra batteries, I was actually wondering the same thing.

PULP FOR PREZ!

 

noice review

 

I picked up the extended warranty from Best Buy also. I must say from what I hear it is a great deal for 250. I was also told they will give you a new battery once a year.


Howard

 

Hey Pulp, great review. as for the no "on screen display" for volume, I use one from microsoft, it looks rather neat, and goes good with the silver XP. What it comes in can do some other stuff for the keyboard, as it says, but I haven't played around with it yet.

Link here:
http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/m...=xp&lang=en&driverVersion=IntelliType Pro 5.2

It shouldn't take much as far as resources. I haven't noticed any drop in performance.
Here is a quick pic.

 

Do you get to keep the old battery after getting a new one... Popping a 1:30 hr battery after you used the new one up isn't bad...

 

eey man..
i want to know what pc is better

the gateway 7510GX or TravelMate 4402WLMi

 

Battery life on the TravelMate is better, as is the GPU, and it's my understanding that Acer is a slightly better brand than Gateway.

The Gateway, on the other hand, has a ridiculously fast CPU, a slightly nicer screen, and can usually be had for a great price.

 

Thanks for the link Hellmanns!! Also, whoever posted and said holding both buttons (+ sound and - Sound) to mute...thanks a bunch! The laptop is definately kick ass but the minor flaws get annoying but these correct almost all of them. Also, thx again hellmanns because my shortcut keys on the keyboard (like the mail button) would pull up outlook and I dind't WANT outlook and I couldn't find a way to fix it. The sound thing looks and works great, thanks again everyone!

 

man can u run 3dmark03 and tellme score

 

I didn't realize how killer my [7510GX] laptop is until I had problems writing DVDs. You gotta use the DVD+R disk >Dough!<

Great Review Pulp! You said you do video editing, any tips on freeware for someone just getting started?