- Bluray and HD-DVD Compatible Player
- Lots of Hard Drive Space
- HDTV Compatible TV Tuner
- Lacks FireWire Port
- Could Use Digital Audio Output
- AMD Phenom 9600 Quad Core Desktop Processor
- 3GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
- Two 500GB 7200rpm SATA Drives
- Bluray/HD-DVD Player and 18x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Burner with Labelflash
- ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT Graphics Card with 256MB Memory
- Digital/Analog TV Tuner
- HDA Audio with Stereo Speakers
- v.92 56Kbps Modem, 10/100 Ethernet
- Six USB 2.0, 15-in-1 Card Reader
- Vista Home Premium, Norton Internet Security, MS Works 8.5, Power2Go
2/7/08 – Gateway's GM5664 system is billed as a media hub and in this role is does a very fine job. Much of this can be attributed to the inclusion of a multiformat Bluray and HD-DVD player. This lets the system playback movies on either of the two formats, this making it compatible with whatever format eventually wins out. The system also comes equipped with an HDTV compatible TV tuner that can also be used for older analog TV signals as well.
Now, the system would be even better as a home theater PC if it had a few other features. For example, the system does now have any sort of digital audio output to hook the system up to a home theater surround sound amplifier. It would also be nice to see them include an upgrade that makes it compatible with CableCard systems for use with HD cable television setups. Finally, the lack of a FireWire port makes importing digital video from a camcorder more difficult.
The heart of the GM5664 system is based on the new AMD Phenom 9600 quad core processor. This is AMD's first quad core processor and provides excellent performance for multithreaded or multitasked applications. Its performance does fall below that of Intel's Core 2 Quad processors but it is still respectable. The 3GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 memory let's it run smoothly even with the Windows Vista operating system.
Since the system is designed as a media hub, storage space is very important. Gateway did not skimp on the storage space by including two 500GB SATA hard drives to give it a total of just under one terabyte of storage space. This should provide plenty of storage space for applications and digital media files.
