Gateway adds Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drives, new eMachines desktops

On the heels of the gaming-oriented Gateway FX7020, we get a few more desktop announcements this morning from recent Acer-acquisition Gateway, as well as from its eMachines subsidiary.

The Gateway GM5664, depicted with a monitor not included in the $1,150 price tag.

(Credit: Gateway)

The most interesting component of this news is the hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD drive coming to Gateway's new, retail-only GM5664 desktop. The system includes a quad core AMD Phenom 9600 CPU, a 1TB hard drive, and a 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT graphics card for $1,150. That's not a bad configuration for the price, especially the hard drive. However, if it's the Blu-ray and HD DVD playback you're after, the $949 HP Pavilion SlimLine s3330f has a better price and a more living room-friendly chassis. The similar, non-HD, 500GB hard drive-equipped Gateway GT5662 also debuted today for $750.

As for eMachines, it remains committed to bringing you dual-core PCs on the cheap. We're glad to see that it has embraced AMD's full-fledged Athlon X2 chips, rather than the half-baked AMD Sempron chips it had lying around the warehouse. The T5246 offers the Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2GB of RAM, a 400GB hard drive, and a dual-format DVD burner for $430. That's about as much computer as you would need for basic Windows Vista usage. Further down the budget scale, eMachines still has a single-core PC to offer with the $350 T3642 and its Athlon 64 4000+ chip.

T3642 e-machines. By far the worst computer I have ever owned! Crashed out of the box and crashes several times per HOUR!!!!! Support, What support the support # that is on a sticker on the computer is blocked from 718 (NY) and 314 (MO) area codes, in other words it might work in Kansas or some other small town but not the rest of the country.