I just bought one of these monsters on Friday. I had just received a new nvidia 460 video card from online and went to pop it in my trusty pc that I had built myself years ago, and just kept upgrading parts every other year or so. Poof shorted something out, spent hours trying to fix it and no luck. I happened to have some spare $ so I start perusing the internet and about the best deal I see is the Gateway Fx6840... from best buy. I had to drive to a store 45minutes away to find one in stock that wouldn’t take a week to get shipped in...
The machine itself is very solid EXCEPT for the average video card which I did NOT even try out, immediately swapped in my nvida 460. Playing world of warcraft now with all settings maxed and double sampling, at 1080resolution on an LCD TV and in a 10man raid I’m getting 45-60fps, depending on how busy the screen is. If that’s not descriptive enough, I’m a melee; spell and particle effects go off so fast and bright around me I have to use a macro to target mobs because I cannot make them out thru all the splash and lighting going off on my screen. It’s awesome. Now, I don’t know if that’s a better review of the Gateway or the nvidia 460, you have to decide that. Outside of gaming, the machine is great. I loathe Win7 with a passion, but I have yet to find anything this box can’t do faster and quieter than my old one. Frequently while playing WoW I will be switching between watching a movie and surfing around the internet. While I could do this with my old box also, this one just feels a lot smoother while doing it. I must say I was very impressed by the 2 empty hot swap sata hard drive bays (once I figured out what they were). The power and sata connections are fixed to the bays and they have removable plastic caddies that you can fit any standard hard drive in, slide them in and you are ready (had 2 hdd's left from my old pc, was very smooth transition)
The Bad - NO WINDOWS DISK, ALMOST nonexistent documentation beyond a sheet of paper with a few pictures to tell you how to take the machine out of the cardboard box, plug in the keyboard, plug it into the wall and how to turn it on. There are still buttons on the case I’m trying to figure out what they do... No external button to open the DVD drive. Annoying. To do anything you have to go into explorer and click the eject... very badly thought out.
All in all, other than lack of documentation and Win7, I’m pretty darn happy with this purchase. I priced similar components online to consider building another pc from scratch, and the price was comparable, and I don’t have to do the work myself. I cannot speak for the ATI vid card, as I said, it never even saw power in the box, but the write ups I have read about it are meh to average at best. If you are looking for a solid all around pc, I would recommend this. If you have another $200 to kick out for an nvidia 460 vid card you can turn it into a pretty nice gaming pc to boot.
