Comments on: Gateway FX6800-01e Review – Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) Powered Gaming Rig http://www.slashgear.com/gateway-fx6800-01e-review-intel-core-i7-nehalem-powered-gaming-rig-0221147/ Feeding Your Gadget and Tech Obsessions Wed, 16 May 2012 20:24:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Matt Newman http://www.slashgear.com/gateway-fx6800-01e-review-intel-core-i7-nehalem-powered-gaming-rig-0221147/#comment-72390 Matt Newman Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:02:30 +0000 http://www.slashgear.com/?p=21147#comment-72390 Also you CAN overclock it with the right software.

]]> By: Matt Newman http://www.slashgear.com/gateway-fx6800-01e-review-intel-core-i7-nehalem-powered-gaming-rig-0221147/#comment-72389 Matt Newman Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:01:27 +0000 http://www.slashgear.com/?p=21147#comment-72389 1. The PSU IS adequate for a single 4850. IT use’s 4-pins, but the Mobo can accept an 8-pin PSU.

2. If you’re running 2 4850′s on a 450-500W PSU and you think overheating is the main issue, you have another thing comin’. Minimum recommended for that setup is 550W, and I don’t mean peak.

3. I’ve been running Windows 7 since Ocbtober ’09 and haven’t had any issues with crashing or stability.

4. Vista sucks.

5. You’re dumb.

]]> By: fx6800-o1e_Owner http://www.slashgear.com/gateway-fx6800-01e-review-intel-core-i7-nehalem-powered-gaming-rig-0221147/#comment-58846 fx6800-o1e_Owner Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:11:24 +0000 http://www.slashgear.com/?p=21147#comment-58846 The fx6800-01e looks good on paper, but if you are unfortunate enough to own one of these you know it doesn’t nearly as good in real life. I have 2 major and 1 debilitating issue with this computer. 1st major issue: the power supply is not only low but it is the incorrect type for the motherboard. The motherboard needs an 8 pin connector to be powered correctly, however the PSU is only a 4 pin. Four of the eight pins on the motherboard are left empty. Furthermore Gateway advertises it as 500w but it is really 450 watts, with a max output of 500watts for no longer then 17 seconds. (this is printed on the PSU’s sticker)
2nd major issue: the case, while having two PCIeX16 slots is nice the reality is that if you add a second HD4850 gpu to your system the top card will constantly overheat causing the entire computer to shut-off during graphic intensive operation. Literally the power cuts off and then the computer restarts, even if you run the top cards fan at 100% and set both cards core and memory clocks to their lowest settings.
Now for the DEBILITATING ISSUE: The motherboard which may be a fine piece of hardware has a crap BIOS. You can not adjust anything in the mobo’s BIOS which means that even if you spend a little extra cash to get performance ram you will only be able to run the Ram at the preset 1066mhz, while everyone else in the world with an i7 is running their’s at 1600mhz to 2000mhz. Also although the processor has a good cooling solution, you can not increase the processor speed. So although you could probly overclock it easily to around 3.3ghz, which almost all i7 920 setup’s can handle, this BIOS doesn’t let you. Furthermore the i7′s Turbo Boost technology which automatically shuts down idle cores and reroutes the power to active one’s while increasing their core multiplier and thus clock speed is not available on the initial BIOS version that comes with the computer. While Gateway does provide a BIOS update download which enables this feature, they do not provide any instructions on how to install the update. If you google this issue you will come across people who have tried to flash the BIOS anyway which left them with an unbootable computer. Furthermore Gateway provides no free technical service for this issue and if you pay the $50 for tech assistance they still cant help you and your just out $50. Not being able to change BIOS settings is un-heard of and rediculous. I have never felt so ripped in my life. I will end up spending over $1000 in addition to my inital purchase to get this computer to where it can run a game like Crysis with a decent frame rate. All in all I am going to have to replace the motherboard, power supply, processor fan (cant mount the original on any other motherboard), and graphics card. And that is assuming a micro ATX motherboard will fit correctly in this case, and that I will be able to install an intake fan on the front of the case for adequate cooling of graphics cards, and find a processor fan that will work with this case also. So there is a good chance I will have get a new case also and end up spending more on upgrades then I did on the original computer. Gateway wanted something that looked good on paper and was cheap to make, they didnt care how many corners they cut to do so, or what that would mean for user experience. DO NOT TRUST REVIEWS OF THIS COMPUTER THEY ONLY LOOK AT WHAT THE BASIC SPECS ARE AND NOT HOW THIS COMPUTER ACTUALLY PERFORMS OR THE MYRAID OF ISSUES IT ACTUALLY HAS. And just as a final note, this computer was completely unstable before I even so opened the case to see what was really going on in there. It had random system sytem crashes daily, and program crashes hourly. The windows vista Reliability Monitor displays a downward sloping line graph which plunges towards the bottom and then levels out somewhere around “miscellaneous failures”

]]>