Gateway 700XL

WHAT'S HOT: The latest 700XL--the company's top-of-the-line PC-- comes with a long list of high-end components. For starters, our test system caried Intel's new 875P chip set matched with a 3-GHz Pentium 4 processor and 512MB of fast DDR400 SDRAM (since we tested this system, Gateway has changed the standard configuration to include 1GB of memory for $100 more than the listed price of $3299). The new chip set uses an 800-MHz frontside bus (up from 533-MHz on previous Intel chip sets), so data can be transferred faster between the processor, the memory, and other components. Our experience seemed to bear out this claim: The system achieved a 126 score on PC WorldBench 4 tests-a 7-point boost over the last 700XL we tested.

This updated PC also includes a treasure trove of hardware and software for working with video. Its twin 250GB hard drives connected via a RAID controller appear as one massive 500GB...