Gateway DT70 Desktop PC Review

We fondly remember Gateway from the days it was called Gateway 2000 and chose spotted cows as its stars for its adverts in the likes of Computer Shopper and a slew of other now-extinct printed magazines.

Things have now moved on and Gateway is now part of Taiwanese powerhouse, Acer, which also owns Packard Bell and E-machines. Acer has rejigged its offering and is pitching Gateway as an Intel-only provider which covers desktops, servers, laptops, storage and monitors, all for the corporate market.

The DT70 is the full, tower version of Gateway's Desktop range and like so many others, it is charcoal black in colour (ed : you're missing the beige boxes?). The model we received was sturdily built and reminded us of the Dell Vostro 230MT models.

As one would expect from a corporate desktop box, Acer put function before form but this doesn't mean that the DT70 is unattractive, far from that.

We liked the orange strip in the the front and the raised front panel where four USB ports and a pair of audio jacks were located. At the back, there are six USB ports (bringing the total to 10), one GB Ethernet port, one VGA and DVI, two PS2 & serial ports and more audio jacks.

The DT70 has two external 5.25-inch bays and two 3.5-inch ones although we'd be curious to know what they'd be used for (floppy disk drives? Tape drives? card reader?). One of the bigger bays is occupied by a generic DVD writer.

Interestingly, Gateway has decided to have a side panel with ventilation holes to cool the processor efficiently. Opening the case only requires undoing two screws and inside the DT70 is unsurprisingly very tidy and empty.

The Acer-based ATX motherboard housed an Intel Core i5-650 running at 3.2GHz with 4MB L2 cache. There are four DIMM memory slots which can each take 4GB DDR3 memory although our review unit came with a pair of 2GB ones.

Also on the board are one PCI Express 2.0 x16, one PCIE 2.0 x1 and two 5V PCI 2.3 slots, all of which were empty. As this is a Core i5, the graphics module - Intel HD - is located on the processor itself. The Intel Q57 Express chipset supports six SATA devices (four free) and there seems to be a Parallel port on the motherboard itself.