Gateway GT5692: low-cost desktop is decent, unremarkable.(REVIEWS: DESKTOPS)(Product/service evaluation)(Brief article)

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AT JUST $549.99, Gateway's GT5692 is priced well within the reach of most anyone in the market for an inexpensive desktop PC. With a three-core 2.1GHz Phenom X3 8450 processor and 4GB of DDR2 RAM, the machine is decently outfitted for a system in this price range, and it kept up nicely with similarly priced systems we've recently tested.

So, what do you want to do with it?

If you want to play games, you'll need to spend some additional money on a decent discrete graphics card for the free PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slot, as the integrated Radeon HD 3200 solution here won't cut it; we got a chilly 15.7 frames per second in Company of Heroes DirectX 9 at a resolution of 1,280x1,024. (For the expansion-minded, there's also a free PCIe x1 and a regular PCI slot available; a modem occupies another PCI slot.)

Looking for a media machine? You've got the start of one here: There are ports for eight-channel audio, an HDMI output for connecting to an HDTV, a 500GB hard drive, a multiformat card reader to ...