Hey Mike....where exactly is that 9300 going to be "sucking wind"? Opening up Excel?
Okay...here are some:
Converting divx to DVD...the difference in processor power could save you hours on a typical DVD job...say getting all of season 1 of battlestar galactica on DVD.
RTS games...the A64 can handle many more units smoothly.
Downloading bit torrents while your antivirus software constantly scans everything and doing something else, like working in photshop at the same time.
Video editing, rendering, etc..... Anything you need a CPU for.
say, it's the functional equivelant of that Gateway, in all applications,
Maybe in all applications that YOU use. There's a difference. Many people, probably you among them, use their PCs to play games, surf the net and get email. There's nothing wrong with that...but many of us do more.
excpet for gaming where it utterly destroys the gateway. Not just shooters either.
No...mostly FPS games. What other games depend so heavily on 3D performance? There are a few...Silent Hunter 3 for example (which the gateway plays beautifully, but the Dell would do a better job), but not many.
RPGs, such as Vampire Bloodlines, are increasingly switching to 3D engines, but most are FAR behind FPS in GPU requirements.
What other game, be it solitaire or flight sim, will the Gateway hold any advantage over the 9300?
I'll give you one I'm playing right now...Stronghold 2. It's a 3D RTS...very nice to look at. The Gateway runs it at high res with antialiasing and aniso filtering both set to maximum and it's smooth as butter (very high framerates). More importantly, the A64 3700 can handle massive numbers of units without bogging down. I started playing this game on my P4 3.2GHz desktop (Radeon 9800 Pro, 1GB RAM) but transfered my saves to the Gateway...in one particular siege when I'd built up a huge army, the number of units bogged down the P4, making it slow and difficult to control the army. The Athlon handled it beautifully, hooked up to my desktops LCD at 1280x1024 (again, all settings at maximum).
Not every game needs 3D power...many need CPU power. RTS games are a good example.
The dvd writer is nice, and the extra 40 gigs of HD space is nice too.
Both of these mean that the machine can serve as an extra DVD burning lab when necessary, and those extra 40GB can store over 100 TV episodes in Divx format for watching on the nice glossy widescreen display.
If you're not a gamer, I can see getting that Gateway, or an IBM, etc.
Again, get off the FPS kick...not everyone plays them. I for one get bored of them after oggling over how pretty they are. I've never finished an FPS game since the first Doom in the early 90s.
For ANY kind of gaming, the 9300 is king, IMO.
I trust by now you understand the error of that statement.
It should read: for FPS gaming, the XPS Gen 2 is king, followed closely by the 9300, with the Gateway sucking wind far behind. For all other gaming, the Dell is either functionally the same, slightly better, or inferior (in the case of RTS games).
For anythingn else, including watching dvd's on a nice 17" wuga screen, the 9300 is at least as good as anything else...IMO.
You'll get no argument from me there.
With all this said...the performance advantage of the Gateway is not huge. The 9300, for instance, is much farther ahead of the Gateway in FPS games than the Gateway is ahead of the Dell in RTS games.
For someone that doesn't play FPS games much, let alone on a laptop...the Gateway at 1400 bucks is almost too good to be true. However, if I'd had the choice between the gateway at 1400 or your refurbished dell at a 1000...I'd take the Dell. It's too much bang for the buck to pass up...refurb or no.
