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Manufacturer
Gateway
Description
Positives:
Slim BTX design; designed for managed computing and platform stability; low price.
Negatives:
Half-height PCI slots; necessary options can double the price; limited connectivity options.
Facts:
Gateway's midrange E-2600 series is a good fit for small businesses that need professional system-management features at a low price, without making business resort to bottom-of-the-barrel components.
Note: This product is part of the Gateway E-2600 series. .
Review
Gateway's new E-2600S is aimed squarely at the small-business audience, offering platform stability along with bundled management apps. With a base price of only $579, the E-2600S offers small business features at a low price, without making businesses settle for bottom-of-the-barrel components. But adding useful extras, like a dual-core CPU, LCD display, and Microsoft Office, can almost double the price, as in our $1,313 review unit. While the low sticker price quickly evaporates as you add needed features, the system is still a good choice for buyers who need more professional features than are found in a standard consumer system.
The S in the E-2600S indicates Gateway's small-form-factor chassis. This slim case can stand upright or lay flat, and it's less bulky than its midtower counterpart, the Gateway E-2600D. Inside the tool-free chassis, there's scant room for expansion, although there are free x1 and x16 PCI Express slots. These are half-height slots, so standard-size expansion cards won't fit. You also have room for only one hard drive in the case (a 160GB drive in our review unit), and both RAM slots in our system were filled with 512MB modules, for 1GB total.
The system lacks a media card reader, but it does have legacy connections that business users might need, including a 3.5-inch floppy drive. The double-layer DVD burner included with our review unit is an optional upgrade, but it's only a $40 add-on from the standard CD-RW drive, and it's worth the cost. Ports include six USB 2.0 jacks (two front, four rear) and serial, parallel and PS2 ports. Most business users won't need a media card reader, but having the option to include one would have been nice.
The Gateway E-2600S doesn't include as comprehensive a suite of security and management as the Lenovo Care package we found in the Lenovo 3000 J105. Instead, you'll get basic encryption and recovery software, plus Gateway's Systems Manager tools. With the Systems Manager running on client and administrator machines, you can get detailed information about the components in a particular system, monitor a system's health, and even get remote alerts when the chassis is opened. Lenovo's package is more hands-on and provides quick links to multimedia applications, backup software, one-button system recovery, and Web-based service and support, but it doesn't include Gateway's remote management features.
With a 3GHz Pentium 4 631, the Gateway E-2600S should be robust enough for any office task. If you think you'll need more power, Gateway offers a variety of Pentium 4 and dual-core Pentium D processor upgrades, topping out at a 3.4GHz P4 651, which will run you an extra $100. In the SysMark 2004 application benchmarks, our test system (barely) beat out the Lenovo 3000 J105, with a 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 3200, by 5 percent. But it handily beat its 2.8GHz P4 521-powered sister machine, the Gateway E-1500D, by 16 percent. With only an integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 200 for graphics, you won't be able to do much 3D heavy lifting on the E-2600S, and there are no video card upgrade options offered in the configurator. Video output is limited to basic VGA, no DVI option is offered, but that should suffice for most small business situations.
Packed in with the system was a basic black USB keyboard and optical mouse set, along with a small pair of desktop speakers. The bundled software includes Microsoft Works 8, but a handful of upgraded packages are available, including Office Small Business Edition 2003 for an additional $249--nearly half the cost of the base system itself.
Gateway's printed material consists of a setup poster and the complete user guide as a PDF file on the hard drive. Gateway also offers a wide variety of sometimes confusing warranty options. The E-2600S's default three-year Desktop Value Plus plan includes next-business-day onsite service and 24-hour toll-free technical support. You can upgrade to five years of this kind of protection for $299 or choose the more airtight Total Protection Plan ($448 for five years), which adds priority support, allowing you to skip those annoying toll-free phone menus.
Find out more about how we test desktop systems.
System configurations
Dell Dimension E310
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP2; 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 521; Intel 915G chipset; 512MB DDR2 SDRAM 400MHz; integrated Intel 915G graphics chip using 128MB shared memory; two 160GB Western Digital 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drives; integrated Intel 82801FR SATA RAID Controller (RAID 0)
Gateway E-1500D
Windows XP Professional; 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 521; ATI Radeon Xpress 200 IGP chipset; 512MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics chip using 64MB shared memory; 80GB Western Digital 7,200rpm ATA/100 IDE hard drive
Gateway E-2600S
Windows XP Professional SP2; 3.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 631, 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; ATI Radeon Xpress 200 IGP chipset; 256MB (shared) integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 200; 160GB Hitachi 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive
Lenovo 3000 J105
Windows XP Professional SP2; 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 3200+; VIA VT8237 chipset; 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; integrated VIA S3 Unichrome Pro graphics chip using 64MB shared memory; 80GB Western Digital 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive
Lenovo ThinkCentre A52
Windows XP Professional SP2; 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 640; 512MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; Intel 945G chipset; 64MB (shared) ATI Radeon X300 (PCIe); 80GB Maxtor 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive