Gateway DX4850-45u

Gateway DX4850-45u

Desktops for home entertainment typically come to us in slim tower chassis, which makes the midtower-based Gateway DX4850-45 rather unique. It has respectable application performance for its $749 price tag, but a Blu-ray drive and an HDMI output suggest this system was designed for digital media consumption. We wish Gateway hadn't cut so many corners on the motherboard and elsewhere, but non-gaming home office and dorm room denizens (or those that already own a lower-end graphics card) will find this system a reasonably compelling PC for entertainment and day-to-day productivity. With a Blu-ray drive and an HDMI output, the Gateway DX4850-45 clearly wants to be more than just a PC for general use, but its midtower chassis is not the best fit for the living room. The Gateway SX-Series PCs and the Lenovo H320 offer more compact slim tower alternatives, and the various closed-cased small-form-factor computers from Apple, Dell, Gateway-parent Acer, and other vendors offer home entertainment capabilities in chassis that are smaller still. What you do get with the larger Gateway case is expandability.