Gateway 7510GX

Gateway 7510GX

AMD Mobile ALthon 64 3700+ sokect 754
1 GB Samsung DDR 333
ATi Radeon mobility x600 128 MB VRAM dedicated 128 Shared(Hypermemory)
100GB 4200 RPM Fujitsu Hard Drive
DVD-R DL Drive
802.11G wireless biult in
10/100 net and V.92 modem
15.4 1280 x 800 max res.
S-Video out
4x USB 2.0
1xIEEE 1394 Firewire
6 in 1 card reader (yes it has CF!!!)

The case is very sturdy, especially for the LCD panel. Its rock hard.....as far as LCD panel strength goes.
It can even turn off the LED displays from the keyboard.
This system rocks!

I ran 3DMARK05 on it after I had formatted and installed xp pro on it (I couldn’t find any drivers for the sound card for windows xp x64 other wise I'd be using that). First I ran it with default settings (1024x768) and got about 3100 marks on it then I ran it at 1280 X 800 and got about 2900 marks. Not to bad for a laptop, eh? The only real world test I have done is that I play Everquest2 and I changed the settings to high quality. It ran excellent.


The screen is perfect and man is it :glossy: . It doesn’t have that flat look like some of the other LCD panels do. If you don’t like that the screen stretches you can go into the control pannel-display-settings-advanced-displays-pannel and uncheck the option that stretches the screen to fit the LCD. It will just scale down so you'll have black around the edges, neat huh?

The hard drive is a Fujitsu 100GB 4200RPM. I would have liked to have a 5400 but with the 1GB of Samsung DDR333 in there I didn’t even notice a difference. In fact when I was testing the graphics with everquest2 it loaded even faster then my 7200RPM 160GB Western Digital Hard Drive in my desktop(Athlon xp 3200+ 1GB samsungDDR333)

I tested the dvd burner with some 8x dvd-r disks and it burned them at 8x. So you know that it will at lest burn a dvd-r at 8x and I burned a cd-r at 24x. Not bad for a laptop; though the spin up time and access on it was a bit slow but once it started transferring it was just fine.

The speakers are better then I had expected from a laptop. They do seem to distort a little if you play something that has really high treble or really low bass but that’s to be expected. There is a digital sound control button set at the ton by the screen that controls the over all sound. You can even see the sound bar move if you have the volume control window open.

I watched a movie with it and once I was immersed in the movie I had forgotten I was watching and listening to a laptop. I don’t know if it’s just a software problem but I couldn’t get the movie to use the whole screen without the letterbox format included. It was a widescreen movie playing on a wide screen LCD with letter box black strips in the top and bottom. I ended up just playing it at 1024x768 so it wouldn’t stretch out the movie.

I had the brightness of the screen at the normal brightness when I tested the battery (bad mistake I know lol) and got about 1 hour and 50 mins out of it. I was downloading some things using the built in wireless card too so if I had brought the brightness all the way down I would have to guess that it could get maybe 2 hours and 15 mins. Not bad for an Athlon 64 with the ATi x600 and a 15.4 in' screen My last laptop was a Athlon 1600+ with a 12in' screen and a S3 ProsavageDDR graphics card and it almost got 3 hours so considering the big upgrades between them I would say that the performance on the battery is amazing.

The keyboard has the feel of a real sized keyboard. The only thing about it I don’t like is that the space bar is about 2/3 to 1/2 the original space bar size. It also has the \ | and insert button by the space bar. Looking like this:
[ctrl] [window key] [alt] [\] [space bar] [insert] [alt] [windows key] [drop down menu key] and then the direction keys.

The only bad thing about this laptop is that gateway used the older socket 754 processor instead of the newer 939 which means, no dual channel memory other then that there is no difference from the 754 to the 939. The only time it gets hot is when it's sitting on something soft and blocks the air vents.

Over all I am more then satisfied because the day I went to buy it I actually was going to get the Compaq R4025 it has the Athlon 64 3200+ DTR 939 in it and only the x300, everything else is about the same and the Gateway was only $50USD more then the hp which was 1299 (after $50USD mail in rebate) If your looking for something to do gaming on and are not bothered by turning some of the 'eye candy' down some it would be perfect.

Just imagine:
You go to a LAN party and every one has brought their desktops and most of them have their big bulky monitors. As you walk in with your laptop bag, some start to laugh and others are intrigued. You go over to a table that has only a place for a power cord. You take your laptop out of your bag and plug it in and set up the wireless. People start to stair, "Is that a gateway?" some say, "No it can’t be, I didn’t know gateways made a gaming laptop." You show it off and get to be the coolest person their. Once the party is over all you have to do is stick your laptop and power cord in you bag and you’re ready to leave while all the other people are still unplugging the desktop systems.

Moral of the story: buy the gateway 7510GX and you’ll never have to worry about lugging a desktop system around. Also you avoid all the traffic in the parking lot



Correction: Heh i said 3Dmark05 i ment 3Dmark03 i got about 1500 mark in 3dmark05 though XD

 

Thanks for the great review! I think that I am sold on this laptop and with it being on sale is a double bonus! The only things holding me back was the battery and WXGA screen and I think that they both will be alright. Thanks again for the review!

 

Oh yeah great review....

 

I'm gonna say that TemberWolf hit it right on the nose. This is my first laptop and I can't be any happier with my purchase. This this is great. I need audio drivers for winxp64 and I won't be able to ask for anything more from this thing.

 

This should be the audio driver you need: ftp://61.56.86.122/pc/ac97/alc650/wdm_a374.exe

Assuming the 7510GX uses the same sound system as the 7422GX/7426GX.

 

The 7510GX actually uses a different sound chip. The 74xx series used a sweet sweet VIA sound chip that, with some tweaking, produced some excellent sound quality. This was because the 74xx series has a VIA chipset, while the 7510GX has an ATI chipset.

I'm 95% certain it's a different APU in the 7510GX.

 

You might try the same driver that the HP Zv6000 or compaq R4000 uses. They both use the ATI board, and might use the same sound driver...who knows...worth a try.

 

I resently load the latest drivers from http://www.omegadrivers.net/ and overclocked it to 500 core speed and 300 mem speed and ran 3dmark03 again and i got almost 4200 marks....thats 1000 more points then the drivers from gateway. ATi still has yet to provide support for the x600 mobility. Have fun

That web site also has drivers for nvidia as well.