Gateway MC7803U

I'll say one thing about Gateway's MC7803u: It sure doesn't look like it costs only a thousand bucks. Honestly, I'm a little surprised by how the company managed to craft a slick-looking all-purpose laptop and still keep it on a tight budget. Of course, you don't need to be a Mensa candidate to realize that corners must be cut. But after seeing the results, I'm wondering whether the right corners got the axe.pending $1000 won't net you the fastest machine on the block, but the MC7803u does all right for itself. It runs on an Intel 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T5800 CPU, 4GB RAM, and a 512MB AMD Radeon HD 3650 GPU. All of those components make sense if you're Gateway, looking to come in on budget. In reality, however, you end up creating a machine that barely ekes out a score of 78 in WorldBench 6. Though hovering around the average is fine, that kind of performance is hardly capable of delivering a decent game experience. In fact, in our tests Gateway's machine could muster only 79 frames per second in Doom 3 and 94 in FarCry at 1024 by 768 resolution. In comparison, another machine that promises multimedia speed is HP's HDX16. Granted, that model is almost twice the price as configured for our review ($1973), but its high-powered hardware delivered 90 frames per second in Doom 3--at 1280 by 1024 resolution.

Gateway wins back a couple points in battery life, as in our tests the MC7803u managed to survive 3 hours, 48 minutes on a charge of the included battery. This system may not last as long as Lenovo's ThinkPad SL400 (which chugged along for 5 hours, 8 minutes with its massive nine-cell battery), but it hovers right in the range of what we expect of all-purpose laptops. And for portables that require juice for 16-inch screens, its results aren't so shabby.

Something is amiss with this laptop's glass display, though: The 16-inch screen is a little washed out. From the middle to the upper end of the brightness settings, its colors get blasted. A little fine-tuning at the lower settings, and the screen was serviceable long enough for me to write this review on the machine. Perhaps the native 1366 by 768 resolution is a little weak for such a large display.