Gateway MX3410 Review

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The Review

So, just played around with a Gateway MX3410 (don’t bother looking it up on thier site, not a word about it for some reason). It’s available at Futureshop in Canada with the following specs;

Turion 64 X2 TL-50 Dual Core 1.6GHZ
512 DDR
80GB 4200
DVD +/-RW Dual Layer
Nvidia Go 6100 (128 shared)
14.1 Ultrabright XGA
6-cell Li-Ion

$849 CDN

Found the new Turion to be VERY fast. Benchmarks apparently exist that rank it below the Intel variant but, from a basic computer user viewpoint, I couldn’t tell.

Screen is lovely. For a $850 laptop, it’s quite bright, has great uniformity and good colour quality. Looks very, very similar to the Macbook 13 inch screens.

The Nvidia 6100 is a nice touch. Obviously not a gaming card (outside of Solitaire) but it performed much better than the ATI 200M. I love installing my trinity (GTA:SA, BF2, and Oblivion) on these low end systems to see what happens. GTASA was very playable at 800×600, BF2 did well online at the same res. with all options set to low (with max draw)..thinking about 20FPS, and Oblivion ran at low settings, 800×600, with some chop but, surprisingly, did better than one would think.

Build quality on mine was mediocre. My laptop had a pronounced warp on the bottom right hand side and, as a result, sat about 2-5mm off the table at that corner. Other than that, it’s very light and has a pleasing design and colour scheme. Looks much more expensive than $850.

Came boxed with reinstall of XP Home and an AOL coaster.

All in all, I really love this little guy. Pretty good muscle, nice video card (had HD playback features), and looks great. If I return this and get one without a warp, it’s a 9/10…easy.