The Bottom Line
- Relatively Large Hard Drive
- Faster DDR2 Memory
- Less Expensive
- Slower Than Core 2 Duo Notebooks
- No ExpressCard Slot
Description
- AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 Dual Core Mobile Processor
- 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
- 120GB 4200rpm ATA Hard Drive
- 8x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Burner
- 15.4" WXGA (1280x800) LCD and ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 Integrated Graphics
- v.92 56Kbps Modem, 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11b/g Wireless
- Four USB 2.0, One FireWire, Type II PC Card and 4-in-1 Media Card Reader
- 14.1" x 10.4" x 1.3" @ 6.3 lbs.
- Vista Home Premium, MS Works, McAfee Internet Security
Guide Review - Gateway MT6451 Retail Budget Notebook
4/5/07 – While Gateway's direct sales notebooks use Intel Core 2 Duo processors, the retail models use the AMD processors. For the MT6451 notebook, Gateway uses the AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 dual core processor. This gives improved multitasking ability, but the overall performance is below that of the Intel Core 2 Duo models. A nice improvement over other budget notebooks is the inclusion of faster PC2-5300 DDR2 memory compared to the PC2-4200 DDR2 typically used. This helps improve memory access performance.
When compared to the Gateway NX570X direct sales notebook, the MT6451 offers a lot more in terms of storage. It has a 120GB hard drive compared to an 80GB hard drive. This 50% increase in storage space does have a slower rotational speed that keeps performance close between the two. The big difference comes with the DVD burner included in the MT6451. The NX570X still comes with a 24x CD/DVD combo drive.
If there is one area that the Gateway systems fall behind, it seems to be the incorporation of new technologies into the lower cost systems. In this case, the MT6451 does not provide an ExpressCard slot, instead using an older Type II PC Card slot. While ExpressCard didn't take off as fast as things such as PCI-Express, a greater diversity of expansion cards is now available that the MT6451 won't be able to take advantage of.
On the whole, the Gateway MT6451 is a fairly well rounded general purpose budget notebook computer system. It provides plenty of storage space and a good amount of expansion capabilities, as long as you don't need to have a really high performance processor.
