Gateway P-6831FX User Review

I was playing around with the full version of Crysis today and here are soem more benchmarks - this is from the flyby:

19/01/2008 5:29:34 PM - Vista

Run #1- DX10 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Overall Average FPS: 31.87
Run #2- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Overall Average FPS: 36.03
Run #3- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 25.64
Run #4- DX10 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 17.6

 

Run #1- DX9 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Overall Average FPS: 30.425
Run #2- DX9 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Overall Average FPS: 33.27
Run #3- DX9 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 23.87
Run #4- DX9 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 17.32

Same as above expect DX9 this time. I expected DX9 scores to beat the DX10 results.

 

I was in BB today and man this is sexy! Btw, to the OP, did you get an extended warranty from BB? I mean if you have to upgrade the CPU of this beast should it void the original warranty and the extended one if any? Thanks for the review again.

 

Other than a couple of Apple's that went kaput on me right after the warranty ended, I have never experienced a hardware problem with a notebook. Including review samples and ones that I have bought, that is getting close to 100 notebooks.

I am comfortable with the 1 year warranty. The CPU swap is not much harder than doing the same thing on a desktop. That will probably be the full extent of my mods. I won't overclock - that is not much fun when you can't improve the cooling.

 

Nice review.
In regards to the pic below, it does look like a fair amount of lightbleed.

However tho (looking at the large image), judging from the nature of the icons and the taskbar on the desktop it seems the pic was somewhat over saturated which in turn exaggerates the light bleed.

I think normally that light bleed isn't as bad but the pic certainly made it look worse than it actually is. One can take a picture of a lcd that has horrible light bleed and make it look normal and vice versa.

Just thought I mention that because taking accurate pics of lcds is not trivial.

 

Very good point. The picture was taken in the dark with a digital camera set to auto. It might have slowed the exposure.

Any tips on how to take a better picture? I would like to update the article with a better shot.

 

171.16 drivers in Crysis:

19/01/2008 8:23:29 PM - Vista

Run #1- DX10 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Overall Average FPS: 30.615
Run #2- DX10 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 17.645

Not much of a change. Crysis is the only game that gives this PC a problem. I just bought STALKER and teh game is smooth with everything maxed out.

Likewise, Oblivion is smooth set to Ultra High at native resolution.

3dmark06 went down to 6800 with the new driver.

 

Whats the BEST CPU you can put in there?The best I could find so far is Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 Merom 2.4GHz Socket P 35W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80537T7700 - Retail......

 

You could put the extreme in here, but wait for the new CPUs in May.

 

hmm I'm no pro by any stretch of the imagination...but I've taken some shots of lcds and turned out ok.
Do you have manual mode? In the same conditions you took your earlier pics, try 1/6" or1/8", f3.5 or f3.2 (ISO 200, no flash). Use bracketing if the camera supports it.

 

For Merom, the best would be T7800 2.6GHz [locked multipliers; can't OC]
X7900 2.8 GHz [OC-able]

For Penryn, the latest processors which are also Socket P and thus compatible, T9500 2.6 GHz. It has more L2 cache than the Merom T7800.
Don't know if there's an extreme Penryn out yet, though.

We can't judge the quality of the display from screenshots.

I really wish I had gotten this machine. Seems there aren't much complaints about it [yet] but I guess because you can buy it directly at Best Buy, you can always test things out to check if everything's alright before deciding to buy.

 

Well if thats true, how are you going to judge any pictures on your computers screen, it's impossible to replicate what this screen really looks like by taking a picture of it and viewing it on another computer screen (Get REAL!). The only way to honestly see it's quality is to actually be looking at the real thing.

 

I agree you can't accurately depict it 100%. Altho maybe a hot shot photographer with a pro studio can
but amateur pics are tough. But you can still get a decent approximation.

Here's a sample taken at 1/6" f2.8, the icons & fonts are clear and readable ( no bleeding in fonts ):




The screen viewed in person looks better than that, anything would but its a decent representation.
Camera is just some cheap Canon .

 

Thanks for the tips. I'll give it shot.

I've been trying to tune Crysis all night. Medium is playbale but I want the eye candy to work.

There is a mod for STALKER called float32. It made the game look better and work faster. The author is working on a version for Crysis.

 

Well I can be failry certain with the extremely poor viewing angles, screen also being washed out or having the white hue on the entire screen when viewing from the top that the screen isn't what id be looking for. I.e exibiting the same patterns as all the lcd screens ive seen that were poor quality. Is it possible to replace the shoddy screen with a good LG one? If i could take the LCD from my fujitsu and put it on this id be really happy..

 

Of course what I'm saying is not true. Try to PrintScreen a blank, all-black screen on a horrible screen with lots of backlight bleed; we can DEFINITELY see the backlight bleed from the screenshot!

@morphy: That's actually a great shot, at least it's just enought to properly represent the screen quality -- to see if there's backlight bleed or not, to see how colors are displayed, to see how bright the screen is, etc.

 

This is a very nice laptop! Thanks for the review! I'm not a fan of 17" laptops but this one makes me change my mind, if only i was looking for a laptop to buy..

 

scythie is right. Screenshots are taken off the video card's framebuffer...they tell absolutely nothing about the quality of the monitor. They're good for showing the capabilities of the video card but that's about it.

 

I got this baby few days back. I swear on all the apps I used to verify the GPU was 8800m GTS, now it says 8800m GT. Used rivatuner, 3dmark06 and gpuz.

WTF?

 

Probably a software problem. Run 3dmark06 and if your score is close to 7000 (+/- 200 points) you are fine.

 

I went to best buy today, they are sold out. And they don't allow me to buy the demo.

 

Used driver cleaner pro to get rid of all nvidia stuff and reinstalled from gateway recovery disk, still said GT.

Good news is that I did a search on laptopvideo2go.com for 8800m GTS and found only one driver with modified ini, 167.58, so this one did the trick. Got my GTS back

3dmark06 scored same regardless it was GT or GTS, 6750~7000.

 

You can get one online at BestBuy's site they will send it to your house or in-store pickup.

 

The 9-series is 15% faster clock for clock and uses less power/creates less heat. If this gets a refresh for the same price including a T8x00 chip, that would be worth waiting for.

If an OC utility was available for Vista, I am sure this CPU would run stable at 800 MHz FSB. If my math is right 2.0 GHz would be the resulting clock speed (2.5 multiplier). The chipset supports 800. The CPU is probably very conservatively binned.

But all this goofing around is only to increase Crysis performance, because other games run like butter. STALKER with everything maxed out, runs smooth. Even outdoors.

 

I think the reviewer is from Canada, same as me.

Last time I checked, BB in canada still doesn't have it.

I go check again now.

 

Yeah, in Canada it is in-store only. Not sure why.

I think Gateway and Best Buy had no idea how well this would sell.

 

What?!?! I thought Canada was our 51st state? I just bought a new snowboarding jacket made in Canada yesterday it has a panel on the sleeve with a power strip that runs to an inside pocket and controls an Ipod, made by Westcomb. Anyway, lewdvig did you tryout the RAID yet? I read this older article and decided against it. http://techreport.com/articles.x/8059/1 Delivering laptops in Canada would be hard with all those moose running around, and the constant blizzards! http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080122/wl_canada_nm/canada_survival_col

 

Nice review! +1
They have a Best Buy in antarctica??? Where aren't they?

 

I went to best buy today and bought the WD 250gb they have on sale for 129. It happens to be the same exact model that is in there so I figured they were compatible. I set up a raid 0 and put the clean install of vista on it with no bloatware just drivers to set up the hardware. In the windows score the primary hdd transfer score at the bottom went up to 5.9. I can see boot up speeds that are faster but it is hard to see a huge improvement. What can I test with? Would it be better to have them as 2 drives and since they are on separate controllers move the swap file in windows to the D drive? Thanks for your help and let me know how I can benchmark this raid performance.

 

Speed gain from RAID 0 isn't worth the potential risk of not able to recover you data when there is a HD failure. Better RAID system is RAID 0+1 or RAID 5. Unfortunately you need 4 and 3 harddrives respectively.

If you haven't noticed much speed gain, my suggestion is ditch the RAID 0 and reinstall your Windows. If you put your swap file in other HD, it does increase the speed little bit, doubt you will notice though.

 

Download HD Tune and run a test. Post the scores back here. Refere to the chart in the review.

It is mostly just a curiosity thing.

RAID 0 is risky. But if this is just a gaming rig without important files on it, the risk is minimal. That is how I am using my notebook.

 

A little bit OT, but what bag you guys recommend for this laptop. I'm looking for a backpack type or mail messenger style bag in particular. If it will hold a DSLR plus a flash gun then that is the bag that I'm looking for.

Thanks again

 

OT, but I feel there is a need to light up some Americans, since I see countless times that some Americans have no idea. I live in Vancouver which is one of the most populated cities in Canada, and we get about 5 days of snow a year. Most cars here don't ever use winter tires because there is no need and it's a waste of effort.

In northern part of Canada, where not much people living in, they have quite a bit of snow. There aren't much going on there anyways, so who cares. I don't have the exact numbers, but about 80% of Canadians are living in some pretty warm areas of Canada.

 

Today, in Toronto, it was so cold that I had to wear my Polar Bear skin/fur that I caught and salvaged last week while hunting for penguins and seals...

 

Thanks for the excellent review sir. First result on google and exactly what I wanted.

Ill give you all the story of my recent best buy experience. Just yesterday I exchanged my toshiba X P205 I think it was called. The unit with the carbine red case. Well back in august this unit was the sexiest best buy unit offered as far as I could tell. Tons of bells and whistles including the HD drive and 5.1 audio with harmon kardon speakers and a sub. I loved the specs on paper buy the machine didn't seem to perform up to par right out of the box.

My DVD drive was constantly spooling up on its own and vista would regularly "irregularly shut down". Eventually I couldn't even boot up past a diagnostic screen so I took it back to the geek squad.

They did a standard diagnostic and then sent it in for service. Several calls and trips to the store and forty five days later, my machine came back. One manager had previously shut me down completely when I asked if I could exchange it. He offered rather to let me buy a new laptop while mine was away and kindly allow me to return that omw at a later time. Yeah right dick.

But to my great suprise when I came in to claim my machine after returning from service I was lucky enough to deal with one of the managers who is "customer satisfaction" focused rather than "whats good for sales" focused.

When we tried to fire up the machine it was still screwed. The os seemed it needed to be restored. the service center supposedly cleared it after only replacing the optical drive and the geeks ran another diag once they got it back and then called me to tell me it was good to go.

Luckily the current manager was Awesome. He reviewed my case looked at the machine and looked at my customer history and quickly agreed to a full exchange for whatever I wanted. So I decided to pick up the gateway p6831fx.

I am quite weary of owning a gateway but happy to hear the positive remarks on this machine. I'm looking forward to optimizing it with the black viper vista optimization and anything else I can do for myself.

Thanks again for the review and to anyone dealing with best buy getting ripped on a faulty machine should know that its all about getting lucky with the right manager.

 

lewdvig I see you have Oblivion installed according to your screenshots. Did you run any framerate tests with this 'slightly' older but still very demanding game?

Also, I'm not you you realized it or not, but your serial is also clearly visible on the screen shot of the underneath of the laptop, fyi

 

Yeah, Toshiba is still selling the top-end X205 for $2400-2800. The Gateway should be faster in games because of the newer GPU.

I really don't mind Vista at all once you tune it. You can always take the included Vista install disk and use vLite to strip it down even further (that is an art form in itself).

Gateway and otherse could easily create pre-tuned install images. For products like the P series, I think it would be a good idea.

 

Hi lewdvig,

I asked this in the previous review thread, but didn't get a proper answer (not from you, somebody else), could you post the hotkey (the function keys near power button), bluetooth, hdmi and camera drivers for me please. I managed to get most drivers from gateway and windows installed most but the ones posted above either were wrong, unable to find from hours googling or didn't install.

Since I FUBAR'ed and subsequently re-formatted my restore partition I don't have access to these, your helps much appreciated.

Thanks

 

Also interested in Hotkey(with on-screen display) as well. All I can find in the recovery disk/partition is the hotbutton which just enabled the multimedia razer buttons at top. I haven't checked the HDMI but, I think it might come with nvidia video drivers? I could be wrong.

I don't know the uploading driver policy in this forum so, if you need something, PM with your email.

 

Yes. Oblivion runs native resolution, Ultra High (and then some as I dialed up some fo the details further) very smoothly. I will do a FRAPS run for you and report back. I'll add STALKER FRAPS too.

Doh! Thanks! OEM copy of Vista so it might not matter.

HDMI support should come with the Nvidia driver. I have no OSD for the hotkeys on mine. I actually prefer an OSD.

 

Oblivion, ultra high, 1440*900, everything max except items and objects (75%), HDR:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
12171, 223806, 2, 762, 54.382

55 FPS is really good IMO.

 

*sigh

I am a packrat, and I cannot part with my ASUS G2S-A1 until it has outlived its usefulness. It being an ASUS gaming machine in good condition, I'd reckon I could sell it and buy one of these Gateway lappies without any financial loss.

Of course, it's too bad I develop some sentimental bonds with my computers, eh? Kind of sad. Not to mention that my parents would be calling me irresponsible and whatnot...lol. Doesn't matter. I have 5 USB ports on this ASUS.

EDIT: Are those outdoor FPSs lewdvig? And that's just at stock, I assume, perhaps with a tweaked .ini? I would like to know how it handles Qarl's Texture Pack and several other mods, especially script heavy ones, to see if the weak CPU would buckle.

 

Yeah that is outdoors, around the lake and capital city. Inside some of the shops the FPS hits 150-160. I will be testing out the visual enhancements - just as soon as I find my save game.

I never keep notebooks long. It is a running joke among my pals.

 

Hi peter, could you post that driver? have managed to get everything installed now I think, except the hotkey button.

 

I picked this laptop up on Friday and I am very happy with it. I was using a MacBook Pro with the T7700 processor. I have an iMac so I never ran the notebook in the mac os. I wanted a better system to game on and your review sold me.

I went to Yougamers and ran a couple of test on both laptops to see which system would run my games better. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the Gateway had better numbers.

At the time of the test, the only thing better in the Gateway was the video card.

I have a T7700 processor setting around. Does anyone know where I can get a user guide on breaking this beast apart?

Thanks for the great review!

 

Also, does anyone else who has done a clean install, have their processor never step down, mine stays at max frequency all the time, checked via CPU-z and system properties.

 

If your just looking to replace the CPU remove the back cover and it's easily reached, couldn't be easier, which is a huge plus for this machine.

 

Installed and played Crysis last night.
The game ran excellent on regular settings (medium).
I didn't notice lag and the environment looked good.

Too bad the speakers on this machine don't compare to my Toshi X205 and the screen isn't quite as nice.

So far so good though.

The only optimizations I have done thus far is the extra $30 fee to best buy to do their "Optimizations" They told me they go through about 300 registry tweaks, remove all bloat ware, they removed all of the annoying Vista user permission prompts, and uninstalled a bunch of other crap.
I would recommend it for $30

 

did they told u they wwent through a clean install of window vista
? if not its some plain crap... 300 tweaks... wow this is extraordinary but oh well.

 

I don't believe it is a clean vista install.
They have some software that they throw in and it goes and does a bunch of things.
I tried to get more specifics, but the "Agent" I dealt with couldn't even list them. He said they do a ton of optimizing as far as vista was concerned and threw out the number 300 in regard to the registry.

The only thing unwanted left on my machine was Norton.
No biggie. I removed it.

So yeah, I recommend it.