Gateway DX420X

[ Music ] ^M00:00:01 >> Hi I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for CNET.com. Today we are going to talk about the Gateway DX 420X. This system is Gateway's midrange desktop. It's a pretty straightforward mid-Tower case and it has a nice range of a customization options to let you turn into pretty much any kind of PC you want to. On the front of the system you will see a pair of optical drives. Gateway includes a DVD burner as well as a standard DVD CD-RW combo drive. Below that you will find a media card reader, has a lot of different inputs for various types of removable storage. As we said earlier Gateway gives you a lot of options for making this PC your own, the CPU that came with the review unit is a pretty high-end Intel core duo processor, but you can also move it up and down the core two duo scale depending on your price range. Now the memory in this unit is maybe a little bit under spectrum, there is only a gig in here and some people are recommending for windows is that you want at least two gigs as well as a pretty high-end graphics card. Now the graphics card we are talking about is definitely a little higher end than you'll find in most midrange systems. This is a 7900 GT card; you should be able to play pretty much any current game at about 16 by 12 resolution. Now over here you will see two hard drives in a red zero configuration, this system comes with 500 gigs of total storage and that's the most you can get but Gateway does give you the option to add two 10K drives into this system, those are really high end, speedy specs, we don't normally see that in midrange systems. Now what Gateway doesn't offer is either an HD DVD or a blue ray optical drive. We are starting to see those next gen technologies in a few midrange desktops, so the Gateway doesn't have it; it's kind of a hole. Still though, this is a flexible enough system so you can turn it into pretty much any kind of computer you want to, which is not bad considering it is only a midrange system. So I am Rich Brown and that's the Gateway DX 420X. ^M00:01:44 [ Music ]