Gadgetory

hi I'm Richard Brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the gateway sx20 870 UART NP so this is a $500 slim tower PC it's actually one of the few budget pcs we've looked at over the past year now despite all the talk about tablets and touchscreens and others sort of growing PC categories the budget PC market is actually pretty stagnant there's not a lot of difference between this system today and what you could maybe get for a couple hundred dollars more last year overall though this is still a solid desktop workhorse and I'd recommend it to anybody who wants just a straightforward desktop for day-to-day productivity so we'll just quickly go over what you get with this PC here in the front there's a DVD burner behind this front panel down here you get a couple USB ports as well as a media card reader around the back it's pretty simple pretty much what we expect in a budget system you get a couple USB 2 ports some USB 3 ports which is actually a little bit of a surprise and that's nice to see there's VGA video out HDMI output some old-school ps2 mouse and keyboard ports and then up here there's a Wi-Fi card which is a nice feature and you don't always get that a budget system so it's good to see here so this is a slim tower PC which means it's much smaller case in a traditional mid Tower you still have some decent components in here though there's a 2nd generation Intel Core i3 CPU here it's a dual-core chip it's fast enough it runs it about 3.3 gigahertz it'll get most productivity stuff done without too much hassle underneath the optical drive here there's actually four memory slots and that's sort of nice too you don't always get four slots in smaller pcs sometimes you just get two there is no extra hard drive Bay there's one hard drive behind the optical drive here you can't really see it and that represents pretty much all the internal storage you're gonna get up here there's the Wi-Fi card like I mentioned as well as a PCI Express 16x slot here now as I said it's a narrow slim tower case so you can't fit a full-size graphics card in here but you can get half height cards that could actually make a nice upgrade to this PC it won't make sort of a powerhouse gamer but you can put a budget priced 1/2 ID card in here and get actually some decent gaming performance on it if you want to stick to 19 by 10 resolutions so that's pretty much the story of this PC it's for basic productivity you can actually maybe use that as a living room system it's a little bit big but it's small enough that it won't make too much of a mess in your home theater setup and the HDMI output actually makes it easy to connect to a television overall though I'd recommend this to anybody who needs a straightforward system for day-to-day computing or maybe some light duty small office work sorry mirch Brown this is the gateway SX 2870 you are 10 P