Gateway LX6820-01

Gateway LX6820-01 Value Desktop PC

Gateway's LX6820-01 is a sensible "next step up" in the company's LX series of desktop PCs. Compared with the company's $800 LX6810-01 value PC, the LX6820-01 gives you a little more power in the processor, significantly more hard-drive space, and increased frame rates for your games, all for a bit more cash (the price is $980 as of 11/15/09). The downside? Pitted against some of the bigger systems in the value PC arena, the LX6820-01 falls short in features and performance. Interestingly, though Gateway stuck 8GB of memory in its LX6820-01 configuration, it didn't push forward into the triple-channel architecture of Intel's Core i7 platform--a move that surely would have given the system a boost in general performance and increased its ability to compete with other similar desktops. The LX6820-01's 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q9400 processor is a smaller advance from the LX6810-01's 2.33GHz Core 2 Quad Q8200 CPU. Fortunately, in storage capacity the LX6820-01 is a definite improvement over its predecessor: Its 1TB hard drive gives you 360GB of additional space to work with. A bump up to a discrete nVidia GeForce GT230 graphics card (from the LX6810-01's nVidia GeForce GT120) allows the LX6820-01 to output nearly double the frame rates.