Gateway 7426GX Review, Please!

Someone get a hold of this new notebook and tell me how well it performs, especially battery life!

I'm currently looking into a notebook with either the Mobile Athlon 64 processors or the Turion 64 processors.

So far it's pretty much this one or the HP zv6000 series until Acer releases theirs, so I'd like some benchmark results!

 

Hi, I am new to this forum, because I just got my 7426GX, I just opened mine up about 3 hours ago, and I wanted to reinstall windows, so I only used it for about an hour now, so I can't tell you how it performs. My battery at 100% gets about 2 hours 30 minutes, so its not great, but Im always near a plug-in anyways.

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.4Ghz 1mb L2 Cache
1024mb DDR ram
ATI Radeon 9550 64mb Graphics card
15.4" Brightview
100gb HD

I Love it, I am happy I went with this rather than the compaq R3000V, which was $100 more, with "Equal Performance" according to my sales rep.. Ill tell you how it goes along..
(Edited because I realize it is the 7426GX)
--Hellmann

 

Beammeup4,


I just picked one of these up at Best Buy today. I have been searching for a decent laptop for weeks and almost pulled the trigger last night on a 2100.00 HP.

Instead, I waited until this morning to see what deals the local newspaper had.

I picked up the 7426GX for 1399.00. The specs on this unit looked far too good to ignore. The fact that it had the AMD64M 3700+ was the first attraction, then noticing that it had 1GB of RAM, 100GB HD, etc...this machine seemed far too godo to be true.

All things considered, I bit the bullet and will test this laptop vigorously for the next few days. I will post up a review with detailed pictures and specifications after my intitial trial run; so that others can benefit from my experience.

In the meantime, there was a review for the 7422 that I found on this site which was final word I needed to get my butt over to Best Buy today. I fully reccomend reading that review in the meantime, since this is the laptop that has been deemed its replacement.

- John Vilsack

 

I've had this laptop for about a week now.

Battery life: if you turn it to max battery or laptop/portable power mode and enable Powerplay, the battery life a little over three hours. Not fantastic, but good enough.

Quality: I don't have any problems. Of course I don't toss it around or manhandle it.

Speakers: the speakers are very nice...considering their size.

Video Card: The video card is a 9600..I don't know why the call it a 9550...and it's overclocking ability is nothing short of amazing. It's default core clock is 300Mhz...using ATITool I learned that it could run at 418MHz with no errors indefinitely. The ram can only go to 216 from 202 though. To play it safe, I run mine at 400/215 when benchmarking. In games, I don't bother to overclock. I can play Doom 3, medium quality, at 1024x768 with all effects on (except AA) and it runs okay. Sometimes it dips down to 15fps in areas with a lot of lights and activities, but those are rare. In corridors it gets over 50fps and it averages over 30. Half Life 2 runs phenomenally at 1280x800 with no AA but everything else set to high and 8x Aniso and it averages over 40fps. In big open active areas, there are dips, but it's the same with my 9800 Pro on my desktop. What more can you ask for? The screen is so small (compared to a 19" LCD) I don't really miss anitaliasing at all...and that's about the only thing a GeForce go 6800 will let you do that this 9600 can't.

Performance: this is the only laptop I've very had that was faster than my desktop. Even though it's hardrive is half the speed of the desktop's and memory benchmarks reveal the ram is slower, it loads programs faster and does just about everything else faster as well (except games). My desktop is a P4 2.4 OC'd to 3.11GHz, 1GB ram, 160GB Seagate HD, Radeon 9800 Pro. So much for benchmarks.