Gateway Performance 500

With all the talk about AMD's Athlon processors and the Rambus revolution, the current Pentium III CPU (which runs at a mere 100MHz front side bus) has been pushed into the shadows. As a result, Intel has been busy dropping prices, which in turn makes computer like this possible: a Pentium III/500 PC that costs £849, even with 128Mb of RAM.

As you'd expect, this does leave potential buyers with a blocked upgrade path. The biggest obstacle is the Slot 1 motherboard, which also uses Intel's 440BX chipset and is therefore unlikely to be compatible with future versions of Pentium III processors running at 133MHz front side bus. It isn't just the motherboard though - an upgrade would also need either Rambus or PC133 memory, so your path is limited to a slightly faster processor or better quality components.

Gateway's ethos here is back to basics, leaving plenty of room for upgrading in the future. First on many the upgrade hitlist will probably be the 8Mb ATi Rage 128 graphics card, which offers good 2D performance but is a couple of generations behind the latest graphics cards when it comes to 3D acceleration. This is emphasised by its 3DMark total of 2,236, compared to 5,011 scored by the Matrox G400 in a similarly specified machine.

The hard disk is another likely upgrade target. The 6.8Gb Quantum Fireball formats down to 6.4Gb under Windows 98, and this space will soon disappear if you're not careful. There is space for two further hard disks though, together with the one 3.5in and two external 5.25in bays that are vacant.

Memory is unlikely to get much cheaper in the near future, so filling the two remaining DIMM sockets is something for the long term rather than right now. There are also three spare PCI card slots to play with, but this is reduced to two if you want to take advantage of the single ISA slot that shares a backplate.

A Gateway-badged V.90 PCI fax/modem fills one of the PCI slots and is kept company by a Creative SoundBlaster 64V sound card. The latter falls into a similar category to the graphics card: reliable, but no frills. There's no need for luxuries, however, as the sound card is only powering a basic pair of Cambridge SoundWorks speakers. These may be cheap, but what they lack in subtlety they make up for in volume.

This makes the system perfectly adequate for watching movies, which is something you'll be able to do thanks to the Panasonic SR-8584A DVD-ROM drive. This reads DVDs at six-speed and CD-ROMs at a maximum 40-speed. Coupled with some respectable DVD-decoding by the ATi graphics card and the power of the Pentium III/500 processor, it also plays films with few dropped frames. It does suffer from artefacts, though, so it's more suited to action-packed movies than those with rolling landscapes.

The screen itself - Gateway's own-badged EV700 - reflects the budget feel of the system, although it offers a solid 1,024 x 768 image at a 85Hz refresh rate. The image suffers from some geometric distortion, but the good selection of controls on offer via the OSD help to minimise the effect. What they can't solve is a general lack of focus in all areas and some very poor power regulation, so bad in fact that the screen sags noticeably when you switch between windows.

The system is quiet, with the single fan being put to good use thanks to a ducting system over the CPU. The Gateway-badged keyboard is also pleasant to use, while a Microsoft IntelliMouse rounds off the hardware list. We were equally impressed by the selection of software, most notably Microsoft's Word 97 and Works 4.5. The one-year, on-site warranty is followed by two years of return-to-base cover, which isn't to be sniffed at either.