Features and Design

Gateway’s new FX 7020 desktop is not really in competition with the likes of the XPS 720 or HP’s Blackbird 002. Instead, it’s a high-end gaming PC with very good specs, offered at a decent price. It features a revamped chassis, and upgraded hardware throughout.

Phenom-enal

The FX7020 boasts the latest quad-core processor from AMD, the 2.3GHz Phenom 9600. It has four processing cores, 2MB of L3 cache and is air-cooled.

Chipset and RAM

Tying the whole shebang together is an NVIDIA 6150SE chipset, which is based on AMD’s AM2 socket form factor. It supports DDR2 memory, of which there are 3GB of PC2 5300.

Videocard

The current best-bang-for-the-buck video card is without a doubt the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. With 112 stream processors and 512MB of memory, it’s almost as fast as the higher-end GTX card, but half the price. 

Back in Black

The chassis has received a facelift, and is now an ATX chassis rather than a BTX unit, which is a welcome change. It’s all-black and lacking the previous BTX-mandated air duct that resided in the middle-front of the case. The copper highlights we saw on the FX171 notebook are present, linking the two products and keeping the FX line’s aesthetic in tact. At the top of the chassis is the power button and a 15-in-1 media reader with a “Smart Copy” button and integrated IR receiver.

Sure it’s a standard mid-tower and all, but what do you expect for a little more than $1k?

Media Center

The FX7020 is more than just a gaming machine, it appears, and comes with a built-in TV tuner and Media Center remote control. This ties in with the onboard 7.1 audio provided by Realtek to create a system capable of performing Media Center duties. 

Storage

Handling storage duties on the FX7020 is a lone 500GB hard drive. It’s a SATA II Seagate drive with 16MB cache. There are two more SATA ports on the motherboard, but just one empty bay in the hard drive cage. There’s also an empty “portable media drive bay” on the front of the chassis that accepts a Gateway portable hard drive.

You can plop a removable Gateway hard drive into this storage bay.

Optical

Given this PC’s price, we weren’t expecting to see an HD optical drive on this PC. Instead, we have an 18X DVD/-R/RW multi-recorder that includes Labelflash technology, which lets you burn labels onto discs similar to LightScribe.

Other Stuff

It comes with a full-size keyboard, USB optical mouse and some little USB-powered speakers.