Gateway P-6831FX Review

all im telling everyone is what the bb salesmen told me and what ive experienced in my state. he also gave the impression they are selling fast. forgot to mention it above.
 
i saw that offer at one best buy but the other one i went to i didnt see it. i assume you pick a game out at checkout and they dont charge you.
 
RayDaddy said:
Ok swapped out for a T9300 I must say a immeadiate improvment.

stock 3d mark 06 8600

with T9300
3d mark 06 9700

also added 2 7200 rpm seagates for raid 0

picked up the Gskill 4-4-4-12 2 x 2gb and memory bandwidth went from 4000 to 4500 chipset picked up timings just fine.


must say the upgrade really makes a difference especially coupled with the 7200's in raid0

vendor was great on the cpu no issues (grassroots)

very fast.
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How was your stock 3d06 score 8600?? I just picked one up last week and even after a fresh clean Vista install am just over 7000 points.

Mac
 
RayDaddy said:
Ok swapped out for a T9300 I must say a immeadiate improvment.

stock 3d mark 06 8600

with T9300
3d mark 06 9700

also added 2 7200 rpm seagates for raid 0

picked up the Gskill 4-4-4-12 2 x 2gb and memory bandwidth went from 4000 to 4500 chipset picked up timings just fine.


must say the upgrade really makes a difference especially coupled with the 7200's in raid0

vendor was great on the cpu no issues (grassroots)

very fast.
Click to expand...

What Nvidia driver are you using?

.
 
T9300 made the difference. 8600 stock after change. i can get up to 9500 + by ocing the gpu too.

used several drivers but the 171's are the ones i am on now.
 
WozniakMac said:
Well, I bought one yesterday. I was wondering how I get my free game.
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You had to bring the game up to the register and the laptop and the game would package out to where the game is $0.00. Assuming you did buy it on Saturday when the offer was still valid, you should go back and talk to the store you bought it from and see if they'll honor it.
 
Alright, but I bought it on Sunday. I had them do a Rain Check for me because I was away on business when they had it. I got mine for $1199.99 + Tax. I then added 4GB of Geil RAM and T7500 Processor. This thing screams. I was trying to figure if I should use the 250GB 5400 RPM or my 120GB 7200RPM in it. What do you guys think?
 
WozniakMac said:
Alright, but I bought it on Sunday. I had them do a Rain Check for me because I was away on business when they had it. I got mine for $1199.99 + Tax. I then added 4GB of Geil RAM and T7500 Processor. This thing screams. I was trying to figure if I should use the 250GB 5400 RPM or my 120GB 7200RPM in it. What do you guys think?
Click to expand...

Use both of them. The laptop has 2 hard drive bays. Use the 120GB as your OS drive and the 250GB for storage.
 
screw that buy 2 7200's raid them and then get a $5 external enclosure for the 250 and use it for storage. that is what i did and you think is screams now just wait till you pump up the file system to match the machine. :)

can't wait for SSD's to come down.
 
RayDaddy said:
screw that buy 2 7200's raid them and then get a $5 external enclosure for the 250 and use it for storage. that is what i did and you think is screams now just wait till you pump up the file system to match the machine. :)

can't wait for SSD's to come down.
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In real-world desktop use, RAID-0 isn't all that great. It hurts some applications just as much as it helps others. Add in the fact that you're doubling the failure rate and it's not that great at all.
 
well considering I have used raid exclusively on all my 5 desktops and have never had any issues, and the fact that windows, all my games, and all my video conversions happen alot faster with it than without (if you have enoufh cpu/ram/fsb speed to match it) i think i will look past your comments and pay attention to what is happening in front of me on my machines.

pretty easy to see the gains when you go apples for apples with and without and see it in real time right in front of you, not on a benchmark.

sorry i do not agree, but do appreciate your input.
 
anyone know why the mic does not work on this for pass thru audio? is there a fix?
 
hmmm all this talk of this laptop. Might have ot get me one, but i gotta get rid of some desktops for it :) anyone wanna buy a desktop?
 
Seems quite a few have bought the 6831...

Anyone have any dirt....what they dont like about the system or having problems with?
 
Has anybody tried using different Nvidia drivers ? My 2 biggest gripes are the battery sticks out the back about a 1 inch, and the keyboard is not backlit. If its dark in the room, it is tough to see some of the function keys. But for the price, I bet I live. Oh, Vista sucks a big one, but I am working my way through it even though I hate it. It was easy to add a second hard drive, I could care less about raid, I want space.
 
My biggest gripes are that the power brick gets quite hot while surfing and recharging the battery, and I've somehow had the touchpad stop doing it's scroll function/ not load my antivirus/ not load the webcam app/ and not load bigfix. The application problems are an OS related issue and somehow they all load up after a day or two. Weird, but whatever.

The viewing angle is quite small, but once I'm comfortable I adjust the screen and it's not an issue anymore. I'll live with that considering if it came with a 1920x1080/1200 screen the processor or GPU wouldn't be able to keep up. The 1440x900 screen is the perfect resolution for the hardware driving it.

As far as the battery sticking out - I love the fact that it does, considering if it didn't I would probably end up breaking the power supply hookup off the motherboard. I think they intended it to stick out to help prevent issues that people have complained about on previous Gateway laptops.
 
Does anyone know where these are available, and that will ship them to Australia?

Ive contacted gateway and bestbuy, neither ship to australia.

Are they available anywhere else?
 
I was looking for an upgrade form my old 1705/7900gs and this gateway way it.
I look at it as a DIY. so I bought one this week
It needs some TLC...Eventually...$$

2x2gb sticks rather then the 2+1 config in it now...
A new CPU..it works but could be better
A 2nd 250gb HD....it could benefit from 2 7200rpm drives but it gets hot enough.
A new LCD...easy to swap out to upgrade the rez...1440x900 is good enough for some but it will shine with an upgraded lcd

A great game laptop...A cheap door opener that can be easily upgraded later on...
 
any way to get a 6 cell battery for this? and did the ac adaptors go up in price? i thought they were like $40 ewhen i looked now they ar 90?
 
Once I pay off my credit card, I am heading to best buy and picking one of these up. You can't beat the price: performance ratio. Can't wait :)
 
thank you GoHack i think im going to see if i can take a test drive with this laptop, I have been shopping for a nice one for a while now. :)
 
KK, will wait then.

What video drivers you guys using? I haven't found anything over 169.28 that works.
 
where did you find 169.28 , the best I can find is 169.09 . The driver that came with it keep loading mulitple display performance mode on clean boots. I went around it by using the program settings for COD4 and loading it with single performance mode. Made the world of diff. Not choppy at 1440 any more. Hopefully these 169.09 I am downloading will fix that and add a little performance. Well no luck installing either ones you guys listed. Would not install. I still am using the ones that came with it. If anybod finds any better that has installed for them, please link them for me. Thanks
 
Has anybody tried and been successful install a linux distro to dual boot with this laptop?

I wanted to check if anyone had an problems before I attempt to.

Thanks.
 
I am going to pick one of these up next week. Intially i planed on leaving it with the components it comes with and after it's year warrenty runs out i figured i could score some cheap upgrade components 200GB HD 7200RPM, 9300CPU, etc.

This will be my first laptop so i have a couple questions.
Is the extended warrenty worthwhile or is it a scam?
How long is the battery life? I was thinking of taking this to school to take notes in class
Are there any good backpacks out there that will fit this laptop well?
And lastly for those that have bought this awhile ago, how are you liking it?
 
I got this laptop this weekend had to drive about half hour because all best buys around me were sold out. I love it, ordered a matching 250gb WD drive from newegg to do RAID 0 and throw Vista Ultimate x64 on it.
 
Syzygy said:
I am going to pick one of these up next week. Intially i planed on leaving it with the components it comes with and after it's year warrenty runs out i figured i could score some cheap upgrade components 200GB HD 7200RPM, 9300CPU, etc.

This will be my first laptop so i have a couple questions.
Is the extended warrenty worthwhile or is it a scam?
How long is the battery life? I was thinking of taking this to school to take notes in class
Are there any good backpacks out there that will fit this laptop well?
And lastly for those that have bought this awhile ago, how are you liking it?
Click to expand...

You should be able to add a 2nd HD and not void the warranty. If you're just looking to safeguard some info in case of needing to reformat, Vista lets you add another partition to the primary partition. The largest I could go was a 70GB partition for my drive "E" for some reason. I'm pretty sure you can resize existing partitions inside of Vista also.

I bought the $250 extended warranty specifically for the reason of "it's my first laptop". I'm normally extremely careful when I use friends and family laptops, but I just have some eerie feeling that I'll probably drop mine or bump it off a table when I start using it in the garage in the summer (working on the motorcycles and searching forums for specific info). To me I felt it was worth it for the peace of mind. If I don't drop it, well that's all the better. It's up to you though. The warranty is only good for one claim so if you do damage it you better make sure it's more than $250 worth of damage.

Battery life while in power saver mode is supposedly around three hours. I don't ever run the battery out and mostly have it plugged in so I couldn't verify anything, but I'd almost be sure that it would last a couple of hours minimum if you're just taking notes. You could always have it go to sleep mode as soon as you don't need to take any notes. It should wake up pretty fast from that and be ready to go with minimal battery drain.

I didn't buy a backpack so I can't help you there. I bought a soft case that was on sale for $40 and it said it fit 17" notebooks. This one fit well, but I won't be able to carry a lot of accessories in it.

After having it a month and a half I can say it is a great purchase. I bought a 10ft. HDMI cable from monoprice.com and some USB extension cables for my extra keyboard and mouse and play Battlefield 2 on my HDTV :cool: I only run it at 1280x720 because I have a 720P LCD, but I think I'm going to try 1080P and see if the FOV is any better. Runs extremely well, but like my desktop when I had an Opteron 175 @ 2.5GHz, more MHz is always better. I'll probably go for a 9300 in the fall when prices should be quite reasonable, but for now it plays just fine.

I don't regret buying it one bit.

The only quirk I have had with it is that the touchpad drivers sometimes don't load, and that stops my antivirus from loading as well. I reload the drivers and everything is back to normal. Happens about every week and a half. Weird, but not a Gateway problem. I just loaded SP1 on it so I guess we'll see if it happens anymore.
 
jg3 said:
where did you find 169.28 , the best I can find is 169.09 . The driver that came with it keep loading mulitple display performance mode on clean boots. I went around it by using the program settings for COD4 and loading it with single performance mode. Made the world of diff. Not choppy at 1440 any more. Hopefully these 169.09 I am downloading will fix that and add a little performance. Well no luck installing either ones you guys listed. Would not install. I still am using the ones that came with it. If anybod finds any better that has installed for them, please link them for me. Thanks
Click to expand...
On Laptop Video 2 Go's Forum, 169.44 didn't work for me either.

169.28, 169.09, and 167.67(gateway) are the only real stable ones. =\
 
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