Gateway GT5670 Budget Desktop Personal Computer

5/3/08 – Gateway's GT5670 is very unique among the budget desktops. It is probably the first to officially use the new AMD Phenom 8400 CPU that features three processor cores. This gives it a slight advantage over the dual core processors in terms of multitasking or multithreaded applications. It still falls short of many other dual core processors in single applications or quad core processors for mulithreaded applications. The fact that Gateway includes 3GB of memory with the GT5670 just helps it push itself even further in terms of performance with the Vista operating system.

Storage on the Gateway GT5670 is pretty much what one would expect to find in a budget system. The 320GB hard drive is fairly small in this era of terabyte drives but it is on par with what most other budget desktops offer. The 18x dual layer DVD burner handles all recording and playback of CD and DVD media. As a plus, the drive can also burn labels directly to LabelFlash compatible CD and DVD media. A 15-in-1 card reader allows it to interface with the most common flash memory cards for digital peripherals.

The biggest flaw with the GT5670 has to do with the expansion ports. Gateway has elected to not include a FireWire port on the system. This means the GT5670 can't use the most common interface between a PC and digital camcorders. This greatly reduces the ability of the GT5670 to be used for digital video work without incurring extra expense to add the port.

One other item of note is the amount of trialware on the system. This is becoming a much more common practice, but the inclusion of all this degrades the performance of the system unless users take the time to remove all the applications they do not intend on using.

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