Gateway DX4200-09 review

The DX4200-09 is another one of Gateway's midrange PCs built for light to moderate users in mind. Spending $510 on this model gives you a 1.8GHz quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, an integrated graphics chip, and a 640GB hard drive. If you can stretch your budget a bit and put an extra $50 forward, HP offers the Pavilion a6700y desktop that matches components but outperforms the Gateway across the board. If you care less about performance and want more features in your desktop, Acer's $470 Aspire X1700 outclasses this Gateway on that front. We'd only recommend this system to the handful of you who might value hard-drive size above all else.

The chassis of the Gateway DX4200-09 recalls the DX4200-UB001A that we reviewed last year. The front faceplate looks exactly the same, with a media manager, dual-layer DVD burner, and an open bay below to add an extra drive. There's a FireWire port as well as a couple of personal audio jacks at the bottom.

The rear gives you more of the same ports that you get up front, like a few extra USB inputs, another FireWire port, a collection of audio jacks, and an HDMI port to connect the computer to an HDMI-equipped monitor or television. Although it's easy to glaze over the included components, Gateway does give you ample room to make internal upgrades. There's room for two extra memory chips, a PCI slot (in addition to another occupied by the 56k modem), a smaller 1x PCI Express slot, and a 16x PCI Express slot for a graphics card. You can also drop two more hard drives into the exposed bay, in addition to adding another forward-facing optical drive.

The $560 HP Pavilion a6700y offers almost a component-for-component match to our Gateway, save a few subtle differences that give HP the ammunition to pull ahead. For example, both systems share the same CPU clock speed and built-in RAM, but the Gateway has a larger hard drive and more video memory than the HP. We suspect that portioning off more integrated video memory actually hurts the Gateway on our application tests. HP also gets you gigabit Ethernet and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi. We don't require either in low-end midtower PCs like these, and in fact we think HP could have spent its features budget more wisely in that system. But by outpacing the Gateway and giving you Wi-Fi, the HP looks a lot more appealing.

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Rendering Multiple CPUs

Rendering Single CPU

HP Pavilion a6750y

9,087 

2,448 

HP Pavilion a6700y

6,697 

1,923 

Dell Inspiron I530-120B

6,501 

3,382 

Gateway DX4200-09

5,819 

1,627 

Dell Inspiron I530S-119B

5,505 

2,947