The Performance is a power desktop with enough leisure-orientated features to qualify it as an all-rounder, suitable for spreadsheets and shoot -'em-ups alike. It's based on a 1.4GHz Pentium 4, teamed up with Intel's 850 motherboard chipset, which brings all the appropriate bells and whistles like AGP 4x, Rambus support and an onboard UltraATA/100 hard disk interface.

We'd have liked to see 256MB as standard on a system like this, but the 128MB supplied is at least the right stuff; 800MHz RDRAM, no less. You do get plenty of room in the basement, thanks to the 40GB Quantum Fireball Plus hard disk, which has a fairly nifty 7,200 rpm spin speed and the aforementioned UltraATA/100 interface to help it keep up with the Joneses. Assuming they care about such things.

Graphics are dealt with by a 32MB AGP 4x ATI Radeon card (that's SDR, not DDR memory, we should point out), so while you aren't getting the absolute last word in the GPU stakes, the 3D end of things is still pretty solid.

The same can't be said for the 17-inch Gateway-branded EV700 FST monitor, which looked a bit grainy and suffered from noticeable voltage regulation problems, which made the picture size jump when windows were opened and closed.

Cooling fans can be a pain with fast, hot silicon in the house, but although the Performance has no fewer than three shunting the air around inside its fairly big midi-tower case, it wasn't excessively noisy. The case merits further mention for being sensibly designed so that you can open it easily and quickly, and add or remove both drives and cards without needing any tools.

Gateway rounds off the specification with a 16-speed Matsushita DVD-ROM drive and a basic Conexant V.90 fax modem, but there's room for another drive of each size at the front, and three more PCI cards at the back, so you could finish the Performance to your satisfaction fairly easily, and Gateway has a good online specification tweaker for just that purpose.

If the machine is going to see service as a games platform, you might need to have a think about the speakers that come with it. You get a 2.1 set by Boston Acoustics (BA735) which is fine as far as it goes, but it's two satellites short of proper gaming surround sound, never mind the AC-3 decoder and three extra speakers needed for Dolby Digital DVD soundtracks.

When you step back from the Performance, it's hard not to see a machine where the emphasis on a fast CPU and expensive memory has soaked up money that could have been more evenly distributed around the rest of the components. The other problem is, of course, AMD's Athlon, which remains both cheaper and demonstrably faster than the current crop of Pentium 4s, so while the Performance is a fair effort, it doesn't by any means have the floor all to itself.

Verdict
On paper, this quite a lot of computer for your money, but it's slightly let down by the monitor. Also, there's no getting around the fact that the same money spent on an Athlon-based PC would get you a faster system, but this isn't Gateway's fault.

Company: Gateway

Contact: 0800 462000

Tags: advanced micro devices boston acoustics dolby digital accelerated graphics port intel corporation dvd amd hardware