Gateway 500 Media Center PC

WHAT'S HOT: On the outside, Gateway's entertainment PC looks identical to the company's other black and silver boxes. Inside, the Media Center PC 500 is a multimedia tour de force. It starts with a specialized version of Windows XP, the Media Center Edition, that adds an intuitive menu of multimedia tasks: watching or recording TV; creating or playing video DVDs or music CDs; or running an on-screen slide show of your digital photos. A PCI adapter in the Gateway has an S-Video port for hooking up your TV to the PC, and a co-axial connector for cable and satellite. The system also comes with a remote control so you can do all of those important tasks from your easy chair.

Gateway included one optical drive with this system--a DVD-RW/-R/+RW/+R drive that also records CDs, giving you the flexibility to record full-length videos and music or to back up your data on the system's massive 120GB hard drive. Gateway bundled a wealth of blank media for these tasks, including six DVD-R and one DVD-RAM disc, as well as three CD-RW and five CD-R discs.

On our image quality tests, the system's 17-inch FPD1730 LCD monitor displayed crisp and legible fonts on a newsletter and vibrant hues on a test photo. Aided by an NVidia GeForce4 MX 440G-based graphics card with 128MB of memory, the PC ran DVD movies seamlessly, without skips or stutters in action scenes.

Gateway threw in a near library of primers for mastering the ins and outs of video editing. One, replete with colorful illustrations, shows you how to capture, create, and share movies. A version of Pinnacle Studio 8 with its own manual rounds out the video editing offerings.

WHAT'S NOT: Based on our benchmark performance tests, the Media Center PC delivers mediocre speed. With a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 processor and 256MB of DDR333 SDRAM, its PC Worldbench 4 score of 113 was below average for PCs tested with this processor. Upgrading to 512MB of RAM should improve its performance.

Graphics performance was poor in our tests and paled next to other systems that we tested for the March 2003 Top 5 Entertainment PCs chart. In game play, frame rates were low overall, and we noticed some jagged edges and shimmering textures in action scenes.

WHAT ELSE: The midsize tower and single DVD optical drive gives this Gateway moderate room for adding components--it had one internal drive bay for an extra hard drive and two external ones for removable or optical drives. We were able to remove a side panel without effort, and found a neat and organized interior.

The Boston Acoustics BA745 sound system includes two cube-shaped speakers with a built-in headphone jack and volume control. For those with small desks, the diminutive speaker set is ideal, but we had to crank up the volume to hear the bass notes. Once we did, they sounded strong--though not as powerful or rich as the sound from a five-speaker set (a $100 upgrade).

Aimed at families and home offices, the software bundle includes Microsoft Works Suite 2002, The Sims game, Quicken 2002 New User Edition, and the already-mentioned Pinnacle Studio 8. Gateway also throws in an application that makes labels for CDs and DVDs.

UPSHOT: Gateway's new Media Center PC is suitable for homes looking for a combination PC/home entertainment center at a relatively low price.

SUMMARY

Gateway Media Center PC 500 Series $