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For students, professors, researchers, and anyone who dreads piecing together works-cited pages, Quick Cite, developed in a single day by a group of students calling themselves 7Cubed, is a decent tool to strap onto your scholarly tool belt. The $0.99 Quick Cite app for iOS (4.0 or later) and Android uses the phone's camera and barcode scanning technology to generate bibliographic citations for most books printed after 1970 (when book barcodes were first implemented). The reference is then emailed to you in the style of your choice: APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE.
Citation Recitation
Quick Cite doesn't offer an infallible experience. Perhaps the biggest complaint among citations specialists is the app doesn't integrate with other bibliography software, like EndNote or RefWorks. And it doesn't work on all books. But for the times that you can use it, you'll be happy to have it.
Fire up the app, and it asks you for two pieces of information: your e-mail address and the citation style you need. You'll have to type your e-mail address, as the app can't pull it from your contacts list, but once it's in there, the app uses that address until you change it. Only four citation styles are supported, but they cover the three most widely used ones (APA, MLA, and Chicago Manual) and one that computer science and engineering students know and love, IEEE. Click "done" and the camera activates. Crop marks indicate where to line up the barcode. The app is pretty good at recognizing when the alignment is "close enough," so people like me who don't have a steady hand have a lot of wiggle room.
Once Quick Cite sees the barcode, it captures it automatically so the user doesn't have to press any buttons. The citation appears on screen with a confirmation that it has been e-mailed.
Reference Deference
Testing the app in the PCmag labs, I scrounged up a handful of books, some of which are a little out of the ordinary. Quick Cite summoned the references for all but one, an exam prep book (Wireshark Certified Network Analyst: Official Exam Prep Guide, by Laura Chappell). As mentioned before, the app won't be able to find many books printed before 1970 because they often don't have barcodes. That's not to say the book can't have been written before 1970—we're talking about year it was printed. Additionally, if your library has scrapped the book's jacket and the barcode doesn't appear on the actual cover, you may be out of luck.
Twice, it took more than one attempt to get the information, either due to low lighting conditions or the camera's inability to pull the barcode into focus in a timely manner, but eventually it worked. Here's an example of one of the citations in Chicago style:
Another weakness, as you may have noticed from the example, is that Quick Cite's references are sent as plain text, meaning text that should be italicized is not.
Some early app users complained in reviews that Quick Cite excludes from the e-mail the citation style that was selected. This is no longer the case. Every email contains that information, front and center, in all caps in the subject line, for example, "Your CHICAGO Citation."
I guess 7Cubed gave the people what wanted, but the e-mail still misses some opportunities to deliver a better experience. For starters, users have to copy and paste the information from the email into their documents, and this would be a much smoother process if multiple citations could be sent in one single e-mail. Additionally, I would like to see the subject line of the e-mail contain at least one piece of information from the citation, such as the author's surname (which could become unwieldy in combination with a "batch send" feature).
Scholar's Dollar
If you're staring down a tower of books and need citations for all of them, you can imagine the benefit of having Quick Cite. Rather than skimming the first few pages of each of book and then keying information into your laptop, you could flip over each book, one by one, and scan your way to a newly minted bibliography page. You'll still have to copy and paste, add italics, and manually enter them into any bibliography software that you're using, but think of it this way: if you didn't have to do all that, I'm sure 7Cubed would be asking a lot more than a dollar for this helpful academic app.
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With Smurfs' Village, Capcom Mobile has resurrected the classic '80s Hanna-Barbera animated property as a free-to-play iPad game. In Smurfs' Village you strive to build a thriving habitat for your little blue creatures, building mushroom houses, growing crops, and performing other communal duties. The goal? To create a safe haven from the evil wizard Gargamel. Featuring gameplay that's one part Farmville and one part Sim City, Smurfs' Village is an engaging title for those that like management and simulation titles.
Gameplay and Currency
Smurfs' Village's gameplay will be familiar to anyone who's played time-management or society-building games such as Diner Dash, The Sims, or Sim Earth. When Papa Smurf assigns a task, it typically requires you to tap an item in your inventory (such as a mushroom house), and then tap the area of the forest where you want it to be placed. Smurfs walking around the area will execute the task when tapped. As you build up your village, more Smurfs move into town with their own task demands that Papa Smurf delegates to you. By the time you reach level 10, you'll have significant foot traffic. Fortunately, Capcom Mobile raises the difficulty in a very manageable way, so you never feel overwhelmed.
It takes a Smurf a few hours to build a house, but you can speed the process by giving it smurfberries. You slowly earn the Smurfs' favorite fruit by completing tasks, or you can purchase them outright using real-world money from the in-app store. This is where the potential money-sink comes into play: you can purchase a 50-piece bucket for $4.99, a 125-piece bushel for $9.99, a 350-piece barrel for $24.99, an 800-piece wheelbarrow for $49.99, and a huge 2,000-piece wagon for $99.99. Capcom Mobile covers its tail by making clear the fact that you're making a real purchase—twice. I liked that it gave me proper warning, but I freaked out when I accidentally tapped the $99.99 option. Fortunately, I was prompted to confirm the purchase, which I quickly canceled.
Smurfberries have an economy of their own. With them, you can buy extra characters that grant special abilities (such as Smurfette, Hefty Smurf, Lazy Smurf), additional land, and items that increase your rate of acquiring experience points (XP lets you unlock more powerful items). Gold coins are acquired in used in a similar fashion, but for objects used for physically making up your village, such as gates, barrels, and mines.
Charming Visuals and Music
Smurfs' Village features charming 2D visuals that look very much like the Saturday morning cartoon on which it's based. My only gripe with the visuals is the occasional glitchiness; sometimes a Smurf's animation would go a bit wonky, producing an odd, moonwalk-like movement. The audio is light and whimsical, perfectly matching the look and feel of the game. I was a bit disappointment that the Smurfs' "La la la la la la" theme song didn't ring out when I launched the game.
Extras
A camera icon lets you take a screencapture, and after doing so, you're immediately prompted o upload to Facebook. I decided to spare my friends the annoyances of seeing such updates. Papa Smurf will inform you that you can visit nearby villages (which are the creations of other players) so you can see how their settlement is faring, or to leave a gift (such as a piece of pie).
Should You Buy Smurfs' Village?
If you're a fan of the Smurfs or management games in general, you'll find a lot to like in Smurfs' Village. It's low-impact, pick-up-and-play gaming that has a very smooth difficulty escalation—and it's free. Occasional graphics glitch aside, Smurfs' Village is a joy to play, even without plunking down cash for in-game items.
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The Lenovo ThinkStation C20 ($4,618 direct) is being touted as the smallest dual-CPU professional workstation desktop PC. After seeing huge workstations like the Apple Mac Pro ($3,499 list, 3.5 stars) and Lenovo ThinkStation S20 ($3,665 direct, 4 stars), I can verify that this dual Intel Xeon E5640-powered behemoth is as compact as a run-of-the-mill business desktop. The system doesn't seem too small on first flush, but it's rare to see this much power and expandability on anything but the largest desktop chassis.
Design and Features
The C20 is compact for a workstation (you can fit fourteen C20 systems in a 42U rack). It's certainly compact compared with full sized workstation systems like the Apple Mac Pro (Xeon E5620) and Lenovo ThinkStation S20, which can fit about six to ten systems in a 42U rack. The system is mostly black, and reasonably attractive with a perforated mesh front panel, and the ThinkStation logo even rotates to keep the ID consistent when mounted in a server-style rack. When mounted in a rack, you can keep your workstations together in a server closet for servicing convenience, security, cooling, and/or noise control.
The C20's interior is somehow both spacious and compact at the same time: the chassis has expansion space for two additional internal hard drives, two PCI cards, two PCIe x16 cards (one is electrically x4), a PCIe x1 card, and four memory DIMM slots. The system is densely packed: airflow is intelligently designed and plentiful, but there isn't a lot of wiggle room around components in a maxed-out configuration. What's notable is that to save a few bucks on the motherboard fabrication and to differentiate between this model and a higher-end model, there's actually physical space for six more memory slots, but they aren't installed. High-end 3D CAD/CAM users or DCC users working with file sizes that need up to 96GB of memory, can upgrade to the ThinkStation C20x that is geared more toward their needs. For the two PCIe x16 slots, you can have up to two PCIe x16 cards running in SLI, but the third slot (x16 physically, x4 electrically) is there mainly for co-processing (like an extra Quadro for PhysX) or for multiple monitor support. If you max out the desktop, it will support up to eight monitors at once. The system also supports Nvidia's Tesla C1060 GPU compute card in one of the PCIe x16 slots. It comes with a robust PCI/PCIe card retention bracket covering all the slots, so that the graphics cards don't come loose. The retention bracket comes out in one piece, a much more convenient arrangement than the individual brackets seen on some über-gaming rigs. The desktop has three hard drive bays (two free) at the bottom of the unit, with removable tool-less drive sleds for easy swapping. You'll still have to wire the hard drives manually, as there's no backplane system installed, as on systems like the Apple Mac Pro. Two free internal SATA ports on the motherboard are ready to accept your upgrades.
Externally, the C20 is well connected, with 10 USB 2.0 ports and an eSATA port for external hard drive connections. The desktop also has a pair of SPDIF-in and SPDIF-out ports (one port each), for professional-quality digital audio connections. The system's Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 graphics card has a dual-link DVI port (with support for 30-inch LCD panels) and two DisplayPort jacks. I'd like to see USB 3.0 and FireWire as well, for graphics professionals that use those connections on their hard drives. The C20 has a build-to-order FireWire option, but you'll need to install a PCIe USB 3.0 card if you use faster USB 3.0 drives. The desktop has a recessed handle on the top: It's amusingly being touted as "spill-resistant" in case you're the kind of graphics artist or engineer who will use the top of the desktop to hold your drinks.
The C20 came with Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, but the C20 also supports Red Hat Linux, as well as XP Pro 32 and 64-bit if those are what your workplace uses. The system comes with Lenovo's ThinkVantage utilities, which include hardware management and rescue/recovery utilities. The system also has Microsoft Office 2010 starter pre-loaded, software for the DVD burner, and an installer for a trial of Norton Internet Security. If you work out a deal with your Lenovo sales rep, you can customize the system's software build to your specifications.
Performance
The workstation has excellent performance, thanks to its two Intel Xeon E5640 processors and 512MB Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 graphics card. The closest system we've recently reviewed that compares is the Apple Mac Pro (Xeon E5620). The Mac came with two slightly slower Xeon E5620 processors (2.4GHz vs. 2.67GHz), and a more consumer-oriented 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card. As expected, the C20 performed quite a bit faster on the multimedia benchmarks. The C20 took 2 minutes 6 seconds to complete the Handbrake video encoding test and 4:09 to complete the Photoshop CS5 test. It received 9.53 points on the Cinebench R11.5 test for 3D rendering. The Mac Pro trailed (2:22 Handbrake, 4:42 CS5, and 8.62 Cinebench) on the multimedia tests due to its slower processors. It was, however, faster on all the 3D tests, like 3DMark Vantage (4,733 points at Extreme settings for the Mac Pro, vs. 2,500 for the C20) and the Crysis test. Both systems couldn't finish the DX11-powered Lost Planet 2 tests. Since your workstation order will depend on which applications you use (for example, you'd want a Quadro for AutoCAD, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects use), the 3D prowess is less important in this horse race.
One benefit of the Quadro graphics card was apparent when we hooked the C20 up to a large Dell 30-inch monitor: The screen quality was almost sharper than reality, much better than what you'd see from a consumer-level card. You'll definitely notice the difference, for instance, if you are drawing architectural plans for a structure that holds thousands of people. Vague visuals in this situation could lead to a catastrophic event when those plans are translated into a real world building.
So in the horse race between the Lenovo ThinkStation C20 and Apple Mac Pro, who wins? The C20 is certainly your choice if you need to use ISV-certified programs like AutoCAD, Maya, PRO/Engineer, or SolidWorks. The C20's Quadro FX 1800 (and the whole workstation) are certified to work with these programs, so your IT manager won't have to test them post-purchase. The Mac doesn't have ISV certifications on its hardware, though one can argue they're not necessary on the Mac since there's only one source for Mac hardware—Apple. These certifications are often written into contracts, so not having the certifications can cost you some bids. On the hardware side, the Mac Pro does have more convenient hard drive upgrades, thanks to its pre-wired backplane. Though the C20 is much more compact, it doesn't skimp on expandability: Full-sized PCIe x16 cards will fit. Overall, if your users are cross-OS trained or Windows-exclusive, the C20 is the better overall choice. While the Lenovo ThinkStation E20 continues on as our entry-level workstation Editor's Choice, the Lenovo ThinkStation C20 joins it as our new mainstream/high-end workstation Editor's Choice.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Lenovo ThinkStation C20
COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Lenovo ThinkStation C20 with several other desktops side by side.
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The Brother MFC-J615w ($129 direct) offers a good feature set for a moderately priced multifunction printer (MFP). Fax capabilities and an ADF give it some home-office chops, while it has photo-centric features that give it some appeal as a home printer. It brings more to the table than the Brother MFC-J410w ($100 street, 3.5 stars), adding a larger LCD preview screen, photo-paper tray, Ethernet connectivity, USB port, and a longer warranty. Its speed is adequate, as is its text quality, but it falls a bit short on graphics and photo quality.
It can print, copy, scan, and fax. It can print from or scan to media cards or a USB key, and scan to e-mail. It can fax either from its keypad or from a computer (PC Fax).
The MFC-J615w has a matte-black finish and is reasonably compact, measuring 7.1 by 15.4 by 14.8 inches (HWD) and weighing 17.6 pounds. Its 15-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) lets you copy, scan, or fax multi-page documents. It has a 3.3-inch widescreen color LCD—the Brother MFC-J410w's is only 1.9 inches. It has a 100-sheet paper tray, a little scanty for home-office use, but it adds a 20-sheet tray for holding 4-by-6 photo paper.
The printer connects to a PC via a USB cable, or to a network via WiFi (802.11b/g) or Ethernet. We tested it over a USB connection using a computer running Windows Vista. An added bonus: the MFC-J615w comes with a 2-year warranty.
Speed and Output Quality
The MFC-J615w printed out the latest version of our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at 2.4 effective pages per minute (ppm), a typical speed for an MFP at about its price. The Brother MFC-J410w averaged 2.2 ppm on the same tests, while the Lexmark Interpret S405 ($129 direct, 3.5 stars) was clocked at 2.9 ppm. The Editors' Choice Epson Stylus NX625 ($149.99 direct, 4 stars) zipped through the suite at a 4-ppm clip. The MFC-J615w averaged 1:37 in printing 4-by-6 photos.
Its text quality was typical of inkjets, fine for schoolwork or most business uses, but not for documents with which you want to create a good impression, such as a resume.
Graphics quality was a bit off. Colors were undersaturated, giving the output a slightly faded look. Other issues included dithering (solid areas appearing as graininess or fine dots), and posterization (abrupt shifts in color where they should be gradual). One graphic showed significant banding (a pattern of faint stripes or bars of discoloration). The output was okay for schoolwork or internal business use, but I'd be hesitant to use the graphics for formal reports or PowerPoint handouts.
Photo quality was a touch below par. Colors were relatively pale, and there was some loss of detail in brighter areas. A monochrome print showed an obvious tint. Most of the prints could pass for drugstore quality. The photo quality is good enough for basic business tasks for printing out images or web pages for internal use, or for printing out snapshots or family photos for casual distribution.
For $129, the Brother MFC-J615w offers an ample feature set and decent printing speed for a home office, or for the dual role of home and home-office MFP. Text quality is good, but photos and especially graphics were below par. If you don't care about graphics or photo quality, the MFC-J615w is a steal. For a slightly higher price, the Editors' Choice Epson Stylus NX625 provides lightning speed, solid output across the board, and features for both home and home office, though it lacks fax capabilities.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Brother MFC-J615w.
COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Brother MFC-J615w with several other MFPs side by side.
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It's no secret that many Dell printers are manufactured by Lexmark. In reviewing the Dell V313w All-in-One Wireless Printer ($99.99 direct). I noticed that although there are cosmetic differences between it and the Lexmark Impact S305 ($99.99 direct, 3 stars), they're virtually identical in features and design. Their speed proved similar as well, and (with one exception) their output quality. Like its Lexmark counterpart, the V313w is a budget multifunction printer (MFP) that's fast for its price.
Design
The V313w is white, with a glossy black scanner cover. It measures 7 by 18.8 by 13.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 14.5 pounds. Its tilt-up front panel holds a 2-line, text-only display, along with control buttons. The V313w can print, copy, and scan, print from PictBridge-enable cameras, and print from or scan to memory cards and USB keys. However, you can't preview images on screen—to find out what's on your card, you have to print out a proof sheet.
Its 100-sheet paper capacity, although typical of MFPs in its price range, relegates it to light duty as a home-office printer (unless you don't mind adding paper several times a week). The flatbed scanner, which lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF), can fit up to A4-sized paper.
The V313w can connect to a computer by a USB cable or to a network via WiFi (but not by Ethernet). We tested it over a USB connection to a PC running Windows Vista.
Speed and Output Quality
The Dell V313w printed out the latest version of our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at a speed of 2.8 effective pages per minute (ppm), a good speed for a budget MFP. It was a touch faster than the Lexmark Impact S305's 2.7 ppm. The Canon Pixma MG5120 ($109.99 direct, 3.5 stars) averaged 2.4 ppm, while the Brother MFC-J410w ($100 street, 3.5 stars) was clocked at 2.2 ppm. The Editors' Choice Epson Stylus NX625 ($149.99 direct, 4 stars) zipped through the tests at an average of 4 ppm. The V313w averaged 43 seconds to output a 4-by-6 print, a very good time.
Text quality was typical of an inkjet, good enough for home, school, or general business use, though I'd hesitate to use the V313w for documents with which you want to make a good visual impression, such as resumes.
Graphics quality was below what we're accustomed to for an inkjet MFP. Several graphics showed significant banding—a regular pattern of stripes of discoloration. It was distracting enough—particularly in two illustrations with black backgrounds—that I'd hesitate to use the V313w for PowerPoint handouts or school reports. The other issue worth mention was posterization, abrupt shifts in color where they should be gradual.
Photos were a touch below par. One image showed significant dithering—the breakdown of solid areas into graininess. A monochrome photo showed a slight tint. Most of the photos, though, were at a quality you'd expect from drugstore prints.
The Dell V313w is a basic, low-priced MFP that could do light duty in a home office or in a dual role in the home and home office. It has good business printing speed, and blazing photo-printing speed, for a printer at its price. Text quality is good enough for home and standard business uses. Other printers, such as the Brother MFC-J410w, add functionalities such as fax capabilities and an automatic document feeder (ADF) for the same price. For $50 more, the Editors' Choice Epson Stylus NX625 provides blazing business-printing speed and adds greater paper capacity, Ethernet connectivity, and solid output quality across the board.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Dell V313w All-in-One Wireless Printer.
COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Dell V313w All-in-One Wireless Printer with several other MFPs side by side.
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• Dell V313w All-in-One Wireless Printer
• Brother MFC-J615w
• Lexmark Impact S305
• Brother MFC-9970CDW
• Canon imageClass D420
• more
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The 16.1-megapixel Cyber-Shot DSC-T110 ($219.99 direct), the least expensive touch-screen shooter in Sony's lineup, is a great little camera. Its good-looking, the touch screen works well, and photos and HD video look sharp. The T110 isn't completely perfect, but its issues are relatively minor including poor connectivity options and the large 3-inch display showing only a small 2.5-inch image when shooting at maximum resolution. Otherwise, though, the T110 is a solid, affordable touch-screen camera.
Design
The T110 is chic little camera, available in silver, black, red, pink, and violet. I tested a silver model, which resembles the brushed aluminum shell of an Apple MacBook Pro. Its smooth, rectangular body looks very aerodynamic, with curved edges and flat surfaces. The few physical controls (Power button, shutter release, and a zoom rocker) on the top edge of the camera sit flush with the body; even the zoom rocker is just a little nub that moves back and forth inside the camera, but it still feels comfortable to use. The lens is protected by a sliding shield panel that automatically powers the camera on and off (though there's also the aforementioned Power button).
The back of the camera looks like a palm-sized HDTV. There are no buttons, just a touch-screen LCD that sits within a flat black border covered by a glass pane. This design is typically referred to as an Infinity Display; it creates the illusion that the display extends to the end of the camera body.
The display itself isn't particularly impressive, and comes with an odd quirk. The 3-inch touch screen has a mediocre 230K-dot resolution, at a 16:9 aspect ratio, while the camera's sensor is 4:3. If you shoot your photos at full resolution, the screen displays it in a pillarboxed 2.5-inch viewable window. The Editors' Choice Kodak EasyShare M580 ($199.95, 4 stars) offers a 4:3 3-inch 230K dot display that displays photos over the entire screen.
The 4x optical zoom lens has a 25 to 100mm (35mm equivalent) focal length, so it can give you a very wide perspective. It doesn't reach quite as far as the Canon PowerShot SD1400's ($229.99, 4 stars) 4x, 28-112mm (35mm equivalent) zoom, but it can take a wider shot. The lens has a slow, fairly standard f/3.5-6.3 aperture, which limits its usefulness in low light. You'll have to spend a good $100 more, though, for a camera with a faster lens.
Of all the manufacturers, Sony offers the most intuitive touch camera interface. It's colorful, uses easy-to-read fonts and icons, and includes a description for all of its shooting modes and features. It's a great-for-a-camera touch UI, but it's still generations behind your typical touch-screen smartphone experience—so you should throttle down your expectations.
When you shoot in Automatic mode, you never really have to use the touchs creen; all of the mission-critical operations have dedicated buttons (zoom in/out, shutter release, power on/off.) This is a welcome design decision compared with the Nikon Coolpix S70 ($299.95, 2.5 stars), which requires you use the touch screen to zoom in/out.
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The Gateway DX4320-45 ($899.99 list) exists as a middle child between the "lower end" small form factor (SFF) SX series, and the high-end gaming-oriented FX series. Like a stereotypical middle child, it's way too easy to look at this desktops shortcomings in comparison to its siblings, and that's the problem.
Design and Features
The DX4320-45's black chassis looks a lot like the compact Gateway SX2850-33 ($549.99 list, 3.5 stars). In some ways, it's a larger version with the same design cues, like the overhanging lip on top toward the front, with embedded buttons, and power button just above it. However, since the DX4320-45 is larger, that same lip holds a digital media card reader and USB ports in addition to the photo frame button. The built-in tray on the top of the tower has a deeper indent, as well as two more USB ports for charging and syncing your MP3 player, external hard drive, or digital camera.
The DX4320-45 some expansion room, but surprisingly not much more than an SFF desktop. There's space for only one PCI card and one PCIe x1 card. All four memory slots are full, though 8GB should be enough for most users these days. There's room for an extra internal hard drive and an extra internal optical drive, but it's easy enough to plug in an external drive to one of the 10 USB ports, and one optical drive is more than enough. On the outside, the DX4320-45 also has HDMI and DisplayPort on the ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card. For a multimedia-oriented desktop like the DX4320-45, I'd like to see USB 3.0, eSATA, and maybe even FireWire ports at this chassis size and price point.
A boatload of bloatware and shortcuts to eBay, Netflix, Skype, and Gateway Games abound. Strides have been made at Gateway to reduce the bloat on the FX6840-15e ($1,099.99 list, 3 stars) gaming rig, but the DX4320-45 still has a bunch of unwanted programs. You could make the argument that eBay and Netflix users will welcome the shortcuts, but non-users will regard them as ads or clutter. The desktop comes with a subscription to Norton Internet Security, which is only good for a short 60-days. I would like to see at least a year of protection.
Performance
The DX4320-45's 3D performance is decent for a mid-priced desktop, since it comes with a six-core AMD Phenom II processor and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card. This combo allows the system to get playable scores on both Crysis (54 frames per second) and Lost Planet 2 (53 fps), both at 1,280 by 720 resolution (our medium/middle setting). However, both games turn in unplayable 16 fps scores at the high/very high setting. The higher settings usually require a more powerful gaming-oriented desktop with a more powerful processor and discrete graphics card to play well. The DX4320-45 also did well on our multimedia benchmark tests, taking 2 minutes 32 seconds on our Handbrake video encoding test and 5:19 on our Photoshop CS5 test. Overall, it did well, but not stellar, since the $550 SX2850-33 is measurably faster (2:24 on Handbrake, 4:15 on CS5). Sure, the SX2850-33 returns unplayable 3D game scores, but the DX4320-45 should still be faster on multimedia tests, since it's more expensive and theoretically more capable.
The Gateway DX4320-45 is aimed at the same power-hungry crowd that would buy multimedia desktops like the Velocity Micro Vector Holiday Edition ($999 direct, 4.5 stars) (our current mainstream Editors' Choice) and Dell Studio XPS SX8100-2777NBC ($1,149.99 list, 4 stars). While the DX4320-45 is a bit cheaper than both, it's also weaker than the two across the board in terms of features and performance. Also, the Velocity Micro Vector and Dell SX8100-2777NBC are both unburdened by bloatware. The DX4320-45 is bested on the multimedia benchmark tests by its smaller, cheaper stable mate, the SX2850-33. And it's no surprise that the higher-end FX6840-15e has better performance and features for a couple hundred dollars more. If you want more multimedia performance, the SX2850-33 and Asus Essentio CM1630-05 ($479.99 list, 4 stars) can give you what you need for less. If you want 3D and multimedia prowess, the Velocity Micro Vector Holiday Edition is the desktop for you.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Gateway DX4320-45
COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Gateway DX4320-45 with several other desktops side by side.
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