Photograph: Rick Rizner

Gateway refers to the E-4300 4-Bay SB's case style as a microtower, but that term is a bit deceptive. The case works equally well when set on its edge (it has a fold-out foot to keep it stable) or in a conventional desktop orientation. At just over 4 inches high, the case exceptionally thin.

The E-4300 offers slightly more room for expansion than the smaller Dell OptiPlex SX280 and HP Compaq Dc7100 Ultra-Slim Desktop. This PC is the only small system in our group of ten that came with both a floppy drive and a vacant, externally accessible 3.5-inch drive bay capable of housing a removable media drive or second hard drive. Therea??s a single PCI Express x16 slot, plus two standard PCI slots on the motherboard. Unfortunately, only one of the PCI slots is usable; the power supply blocks the other, and there's no slot opening for it at the rear of the case. You can't use a standard-size PCI card in the accessible slot because the case isn't tall enough. Instead, you have to use low-profile PCI cards, which are less common than the larger size.

Our $1408 review unit came with a DVI adapter and a standard VGA port, so the E-4300 can drive a second monitor to complement the 17-inch LCD that shipped with our system.

Gateway supplies six USB 2.0 ports for future expansion: four on the rear, and two on the front. You'll also find headphone and microphone ports. There's one FireWire port on the front of the case and another on the rear.

The E-4300 is noisy at startup: When we turned on the machine, the exhaust fan made a noise reminiscent of a lawnmower working its way through a jungle of wet grass. Fortunately, the system quickly quieted down after booting. Like the fans on many systems, the Gateway's fan is designed to go faster (and push out more air) when the inside of the case gets hot. The fan remained relatively quiet even when CPU usage neared 100 percent.

With a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 CPU and 512MB of DDR2-400 RAM, our test system achieved a creditable WorldBench 5 score of 86. It's one of the few systems we looked at that included vacant RAM slots: Two of the four slots were empty, and they can accommodate a maximum of 4GB of memory.

Upshot: Though a bit larger than some small systems, the Gateway E-4300 4-Bay SB provides a good combination of size and performance.

Richard Baguley