Gateway Gateway FX530XT

Our FX530XT's three 5.25-inch external drive bays were filled with a 2X Blu-ray/DVD-RAM drive, a DVD-rewritable drive, and a multiformat media card reader. Twin 150GB, 10,000-rpm Western Digital Raptor hard drives arranged in a RAID configuration occupied the other two bays (you can configure the system with up to three 750GB hard drives).

All of these high-end components packed in a small case come at the expense of expandability. The inside of the case is difficult to work in and has limited room for additional components. Our review system's basic Intel motherboard had three PCI slots, of which two were taken by the modem and the sound card. There is a spare PCI Express slot if you want to install a second graphics board in an SLI configuration.

The bundled 24-inch Gateway FPD2485W wide-screen LCD produced impressive results, with sharp text and bright, vivid colors. It also detects rotation: When you twist the monitor to portrait orientation, the on-screen display automatically rotates as well. And because the monitor is HDCP-compliant, you can play copy-protected high-def movies directly from a Blu-ray or HD DVD player via the DVI input. The monitor comes by default with a 2.1-channel speaker bar system that clips to the bottom of the monitor; its sound, while adequate for everyday use, isn't particularly loud or impressive. Gateway sells more-powerful sound systems, of course.

The FX530XT costs $4760 (as of July 11, 2007), which is in line with the costs of most other quad-core gaming systems we've tested. If expansion room isn't an issue for you, this Windows Vista Ultimate system holds tremendous gaming appeal, thanks to its formidable processing power, great graphics performance, and gargantuan wide-screen display.

Richard Baguley and Danny Allen