ALMOST Brilliant... (Gateway Select)

Member Name: iaingarland

Product:	Gateway Select
Date:	19/10/01 (139 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: High Quality, Superb Customer Service

Disadvantages: Slightly Noisy, Out of date Graphics card

18 months ago I bought a Select 650 for little over £1000. Even now, with processors twice as fast (following the trend of speed doubling every 18 months) my Athlon still ticks along at a high speed, very consistent and very reliable.

But the only trouble is the Graphics card. Just weeks after my PC was delivered, 3DFX, makers of my Voodoo3, folded. Hereby ends the updated drivers for the card. As a result the games performance is noticably lower than that of a GeForce2 of the time, however this has been a minor set back over the time.

The CD writer that was included works superbly, the Adaptec software supplied does a great job and in the hundreds of CDs I've burned, only one has failed and wrecked the CD. Not bad going.

The DVD player does it's job, and the Gateway DVD player, simple as it is, works wonders. The graphics card makes the picture slightly dark but this can be rectified by playing with the monitor settings.

The monitor, while on the subject, is of a very high standard. At 17" it's not too impressive against today's 19" and 21" beasts, but it handles a huge resolution very easilly without flickering.

The main bonus about Gateway is the technical support, but I'll talk about that in a more general topic.

Overall I can reccomend Gateway Select machines. Although the Athlon chip makes the fan slightly noisy (they run hotter apparently) this is hardly noticable and you'll be left with a wonderful machine at your fingertips.

Summary: