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Alright this is for the extreme people, the skydivers, and the crazy nutjobs
that like to play extreme video games and do silly stuff, you're looking at
the FX542 XT, and this is not your regular old Gateway, this is a very, very, very, very,
very extreme Gateway, and it's got ridiculous specifications, ok.
Let's talk about the processor first, one of the fastest on the market,
the QX9650, that is an extreme edition Intel Core 2 Extreme processor.
What does extreme mean? It means it has an unlock multiplier
so if you're overclocking it, you don't only have to overclock
the frontside bus, you can just simply increase the multiplier
and let the CPU overclock, while leaving the frontside bus
at the same frequency, it operates on a 1333 megahertz frontside bus
natively has 12 megabytes of L2 cache and it's three gigahertz,
ok, quad-core. Get this, eight gigabytes of RAM.
Does anybody have a computer with eight gigabytes of RAM?
I guarantee you nobody does, you lie, you're a liar,
don't listen to him, he doesn't have eight gigs.
The thing is eight gigs of RAM, ok that's pretty insane, DDR2,
800 megahertz, it's very impressive. It's got 1.5 terabytes of storage,
and it accomplishes that by using two 750 gig Hard Drives
in Raid zero array, which Gateway seems to like
to do a lot, all their extreme computers seem to have two hard drives,
and they run raid zero, which I think is fantastic,
the FX173 XL laptop even has two hard drives
in raid zero, all the extreme gateways I've seen have had raid zero.
This is going to be an awesome computer for the video game player
that does not want build his own system. If you refuse
to get your hands dirty and you don't want to assemble
a system, right up your alley. This thing is ready to go,
just the way it comes, it's not even one of those huge cases
it's a regular case, as you can see, it looks
really elegant, it's actually kinda cool, all gray, I'll tell you what,
if you want to play games too, two 9800GTs are in this thing,
they are overclocked and they are running in SLI,
so you're going to get a lot of performance from your video cards,
graphics are going to be no problem, and I'll tell you what,
take a look at this, look right here,
see that? That's an HD DVD/Blu-ray combo drive, that will play DVDs,
CDs, HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, all in one player, no problem.
This right here is a DVD RW drive,
which will do just about every single format of CD and DVD
you can imagine, it has LabelFlash,
which is just like, LightScribe, except you don't need a special disc,
you can pretty much do it on any blank disc, and that will burn a high contrast image
onto the disc using the same laser used to burn the disc itself,
and also, if you look right up here, I'm sorry, right down here,
there we go, over here, you have a flash card digital media manager,
is what they call it, but pretty much all your media sticks go here,
you have SD, MS pro, XD, compact flash is going to work over here,
this is a USB 2.0 port right here on the front, and this is your power button.
And this thing brings new meaning to the word power.
It's really cool, if you look down here, you have an additional two firewire ports,
and another two USB 2.0s right there, down here, your input and your output
for your microphone and headset, for your audio and you got a big fan
right here, you got an even bigger sucking in air through here.
The way this thing works is it sucks in air through here,
it passes through this really cool looking shroud on the inside of thing,
and that shroud kind of goes over the CPU cooler, and then goes
straight out the back, so all of your air is going
in this one streaming motion, straight out the back, keeps that
QX9650 extremely cool. Let me show you the back,
this thing's a little bit heavy, but not too bad.
It's a mid-tower, so that's interesting. Alright, let's take a look at the back.
Lots of good stuff back here, ok? We're going to start off with
the power supply up here at the top go up, there you go, boom,
700 Watt power supply, if you want to upgrade,
bigger video cards in the future, or you know what you're not going
ever do anything else with this, all you're going do with this computer
is overclock it a little bit, and that's it.
Maybe, maybe in a few years upgrade the video cards, because this thing
is extremely, extreme. Yes, extremely, extreme, I don't know if that's
proper English or not, but 700 Watt power supply,
which is more than enough. Moving down the line,
right here, you got your onboard audio, which you know
what this is? This is useless,
because you're not going to be using it. You're going to be using,
check this out, go all the way down to the bottom,
You're going to be using that, that is the Creative Labs X-Fi
sound system, ok you don't even need it. 7.1 channel audio through this,
from Creative Labs, it's one of the best cards, you're going to get
at least 100 times better sound throught this card than you will
on your onboard graphics. And I'm not even talking like
a fake number, I'm talking about 100 times better, ok?
Because you're going to get 100 times less noise,
which is background noise coming off of your motherboard,
your video cards, this is all separate, and it runs down here.
Now, these two video cards, two overclocked 9800GT
NVIDIA video cards, these are the GeForce cards,
and they're running in SLI, so they're both working together
at the same time, to give you maximum performance.
You're getting the performace of two cards, in one computer,
which is amazing. You get 2560 by 1600 maximum resolution,
if you wanted to run two different monitors,
you could, but if you run on SLI, you're just going to run one,
because you're going to be wanting both cards to be powering that one monitor,
to give you the maximum performance, very amazing, very overclocked from factory,
and they're very popular cards. They run very cool and actually very quiet,
because they're 55nm manufacturing process, so they're very efficient
and good for the environment. Now, moving on up here,
you're going to see things are a little backwards,
because this thing has an interesting motherboard,
the PS/2s are on the bottom. Very odd, took me a second,
I looked at it, and I was like, hey, what's going on here?
You have PS/2 for keyboard and PS/2 for mouse.
Right here you got a FireWire, four USB 2.0 ports,
as well as dual gigabit LAN, which is really, really, really awesome and cool,
and then this is that big, main exhaust fan on the back.
I'm going to block this key right here, so you guys don't see it.
Now that is a key for Windows Vista 64-bit Ultimate,
which is probably one of the best operating systems I've
ever had the pleasure of using, despite all of what you may have heard,
it's actually improved a lot over the past year and a half,
it's gotten a lot better, first nothing worked on it,
and I'll tell you what, Microsoft has worked very hard
to get you patches and hotfixes so that everything works, printers work,
devices work, programs work, there's a few programs that still
don't support 64-bit, but most of them still work.
Now, let me open this puppy up. You got a thumbscrew,
thumbscrews are magnificent, magnificent piece of technology that
all case manufacturers should give you. Why should you have to pull the screwdriver
out to unscrew it, a simple latch right here, you pull it, boom,
it's open, look how easy that was. No effort, you got to love it when
OEMs build computers, because you get a great amount
of little stuff like that. Now, let's take a look in here.
This is a little bit interesting, they had to fit a lot of stuff in here,
so let's just go over it. I'm going to show you first of all,
it's obviously the most attractive part, your dual 9800GT video cards
are right there. As I mentioned earlier, you have this interesting
cooling solution. So, you're getting air from these ports in here,
it's coming through here, right on to your very, very large heatsink,
which is right in there. And then it's going to come out
through here the air is going to cool your north bridge and south bridge
chipsets and then it's going to go right out the exhaust fan.
It's going to keep all hot air out. Now you're also going to see over here,
these are your two 750 gigabyte hard drives, those are going to be 1.5 terabytes in total.
And those are operating in raid zero, and if you don't know
what that means, it's both drivers are writing at the same time,
all the information that would be written to one drive,
is split into two, and then they both write
the information down, twice as fast.
So, that's very good for your hard drive performance.
If you're copying and pasting a lot of pictures, or storing a lot
of files or folders or movies and stuff, it's going to be great for that
and now I'll tell you what, they did a really good job
on this case, very large power supply. All the stuff up here, on the top,
if you look at your Blu-ray, your DVD, it's all completely modular.
You pull out this thumscrew, you move that latch back,
and you can slide it out, slide in a new one,
do whatever you want with a computer like this.
And I'll tell you what, it comes with a factory three gigahertz,
but there's no reason to give you a QX9650 and leave it at stock frequency.
You can overclock this thing and I did overclock it,
and I got it to 3.8 gigahertz, with a very, very mild, safe overclock.
Temperatures didn't rise, I didn't do anything stupid, you know,
I'm not going to break the computer, hey you know what, if you do, it's got
a one year warranty, I don't know if it's void when you overclock it,
I wouldn't test it, but you know what,
it's fast enough without overclocking, but if you want to overlock it,
feel free. Got to love the fact that it's got a nice case so
you do whatever you want with. Oh yeah, I forgot, keyboard,
Gateway keyboard, this box has some stuff in it, let me show you what it comes with.
Kind of interesting. Got to know, you know you're spending money on stuff,
you've got to know what you're getting. You've got a power cable, you get a mouse,
very nice. If you have older monitors, and you don't have DVI, right there,
VGA and DVI dongles, so that you can use your older monitor,
no problem, with your brand new computer. And that's pretty much it, that's what you get
with it. Awesome, awesome computer, the FX542 XT from Gateway,
it's one of their more extreme systems, and it's pretty much got
top of the line everything. If you have any question on it,
email me, I'll see you guys next time.
The Gateway FX542 XT is available from the retailers listed here,
or for more information, you can type G180-1008
into any major search engine. For computertv, I'm Albert.
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