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Gateway Gateway P-172X FX

88

Very Good

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Pros
Stylish and sturdy keyboard
HDMI and eSATA ports
Cons
Simply terrible speakers
Off-center mouse is a little awkward

Performance: Superior: 97
Features: Good: 79
Design: Good: 78

Find out how these scores, and their relative weights, combine to produce the PC World Rating.

Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS2	388
Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP-3 DirectX	352
Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP-3 Rendering	646
Battery Life (Video Playback in hh:mm)	2:42:26 AM
Doom 3, 1024 by 768, 32-Bit	122.03
Far Cry, 1024 by 768, 32-Bit	163.36
Firefox 2	333
Microsoft Office 2003 with SP-1	359
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0	228
Multitasking	406
Nero 7 Ultra Edition	409
Number of Included Batteries	1
Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5	218
Winzip Computing WinZip 10.0	218
WorldBench 6 Score	96
WorldBench 6 Word Score	Superior

What You Should Know about the Gateway P-172X FX

Multitask to Your Heart's Content and Not Bog Down

This laptop, equipped with at least 3GB of memory, will run all of your programs quickly (paired with a high-end CPU, that much memory will make things especially speedy). You'll be able to multitask to your heart's content, too, so go ahead--you can back up the entire contents of your hard drive to a DVD while watching YouTube videos and experimenting with textures on the 2MB photo of your client's art gallery in Photoshop. The main drawback is the extra expense: Loading up with more than the standard amount of RAM (2GB, these days) can add hundreds of dollars to a laptop's price, though it boosts performance by only about 10 percent. Also bear in mind that if you hope to use more than 3GB of RAM effectively, your PC must have a 64-bit installation of Windows.