Gateway P-6831 FX: Best Midrange Gaming Notebook Ever
by Jarred Walton on March 28, 2008 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Other Application Performance
Finally, we ran several other performance benchmarks, including the popular Futuremark 3DMark and PCMark test suites. Since this is primarily a gaming notebook, we aren't as concerned with performance in general applications. Besides, just about any modern computer is more than sufficient for your typical office and Internet work. Because of the slower CPU, the Gateway P-6831 scores much lower in many of these benchmarks — excepting 3DMark, of course.
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The Gateway P-6831 places right where we would expect it to in these tests. In the 3DMark benchmarks, it falls below all of the 8800M GTX notebooks as well as the SLI notebooks we've tested, but it bests everything else. In PCMark05, it places at the bottom of the pack, helped by the 5400RPM hard drive and the T5450 CPU. Note that for 3DMark06, you need to use an extrenal LCD capable of 1280x1024 resolution to generate comparable results. (At the default 1280x800 use the 1440x900 laptop LCD, our score improved to 7005.)
We're also including full PCMark Vantage results starting with this review. Most of the scores should be similar to PCMark05, but for now we only have results from the AVADirect M570RU, Dell M1730, and Gateway P-6831 laptops, and variation between benchmark runs seems to be a bit higher than other tests (around 5%). Our results are summarized in the following table:
| PCMark Vantage Performance Breakdown | |||
| AVADirect (Clevo) M570RU |
Dell XPS M1730 | Gateway P-6831 FX |
|
| PCMark Suite | 3995 | 4496 | 2946 |
| Memories Suite | 3127 | 3559 | 2293 |
| TV and Movies Suite | 2585 | 2853 | 2140 |
| Gaming Suite | 4429 | 4015 | 2687 |
| Music Suite | 3808 | 4390 | 2988 |
| Commincations Suite | 3558 | 3907 | 2852 |
| Productivity Suite | 3954 | 4189 | 2041 |
| HDD Test Suite | 3137 | 4139 | 2585 |
In video encoding and 3D rendering, the CPU is almost the sole determinant of performance. We only have results from Penryn X9000 systems for these tests, and outside of QuickTime (where the RAID 0 hard drive array helps the XPS system), we see better than linear clock speed scaling from the X9000. The 2.8GHz chip is clocked 68% faster than the T5450, and it performs up to 85% faster. Having three times as much L2 cache certainly helps.
Again, keep in mind as we see CUDA enabled applications in the future, raw CPU performance may turn out to be less important for these highly parallelizable tasks.
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ap90033 - Sunday, March 30, 2008 - link
Yes it comes with a Vista Home Premium DVD....win32asmguy - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I bought one of these yesterday at Best Buy after they put it on sale for $1249 again.It does indeed have a real Vista re-install cd. The CD also includes none of the extra bundled applications or such. However, you can also make a "restore" DVD from an included program that will recreate its 10GB recovery partition and return it to a factory fresh installation. Its nice to see Gateway let people go either way with this.
The P-6831fx is also actually due for an update soon. Its supposed to be called the P-6860fx and will have a T5550 (1.83ghz, 667fsb, 2mb) and a 320GB hdd instead of the 250GB. My P-6831fx actually already has a T5550 in it, as gateway's ODM has appeared to already run out of the T5450's as of the last shipment. The slower processor is definitely a setback, but I will eventually upgrade to a T9300 to close the gap in performance even closer to the laptops with the GTX.
Oh, and CPU-Z does report that it runs in dual channel mode, however it also takes a small performance hit due to not being both 2GB sticks. Other users report their Vista memory experience index from jumping from 4.6 to 4.8 when upgrading to 4GB.
iclicku - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
The laptop comes with a Vista DVD. However, you'll have to burn a back-up DVD for drivers and applications. It should be the first thing you do before performing a format.The laptop should be fine for Folding @ Home. If not, a simple CPU upgrade should do wonders.
As for the 3GB of ram, it is in fact running in dual channel mode so no worries there. It's definately useful since Vista needs as much memory it can get it's grubby little hands on.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
[quote] Imagine being able to buy a very nice sports car that could compete with the Dodge Viper at one third the cost, and that's what Gateway has released on the market. [/quote]In other words it is the Evo/STI of the gaming laptop world. Maybe one of the ones with the bigger screens qualifies as a base Corvette.
Corland - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
It would be nice to see things like the MacBook Pro with LED backlight (or a regular MacBook) in the color comparison and LCD tests for comparison sake- comparing gaming laptop LCD's to each other is fine, but having some other common laptop screens that some of us will have worked with would also be useful....iclicku - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
As the review states, you can't beat the value of this laptop. I purchased this laptop at Best Buy during the President's Day sale for $1199 and it came with a $50 game (COD4). Out of the box, it's a great machine. However, the review doesn't mention the amount of bloatware that is on the machine (which is commonplace).I managed to place a few upgrades in my machine. I placed a T7500 C2D, 4GB total ram, 200GB 7200RPM HD, and wiped my machine and installed a dual boot with Vista Business 64-bit and XP Pro 32-bit. I got great deals on the upgrades and the OSes I had from previous machines. Total cost of machine came to $1500.
3dMark06 scores are as follows: (drivers I used are 169.09 from laptopvideo2go.com)
Vista 64 - 8900
XP Pro 32 - 9150
tomek1984 - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Give me few hints how you got video driver to work with XP. I downloaded 169.09 and tried installing it with base file and 2nd time with an updated one by INF file. Nether1 recognized Nvidia hardware. I am using 6860 FX with factory specs+ 2nd harddrive(XP is instaled on 2nd HD)Starcub - Saturday, May 17, 2008 - link
I got a newer driver from laptopvideo2go.com to work by replacing the inf file with nvwi.inf which I extracted from the included originalinfs.zip.ap90033 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Nice, I have one and wondered what the difference would be if I upgraded the CPU...Great review by the way.
ToeJuice - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I own an Asus G2 and it's one of the better (if not the best) midrange gaming laptops I've ever owned or seen. But I guess Asus lappies don't even deserve a mention here?