Gateway all-in-ones add AMD, Core i3, Blu-ray

Following announcements from other vendors who've expanded their AMD-based offerings lately, today Gateway unveiled details of a new midrange all-in-one in its ZX One line. It also has some news on the higher-end of the scale.

(Credit: Gateway)

Starting off with the AMD side of things, Gateway's new ZX4300-01e expands Gateway's line of 20-inch touch-screen all-in-ones. This new $750 model adopts AMD's new 2.7GHz Athlon II X2 235e dual-core CPUs, and we'll be interested to see how this new config fares against the 2.1GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core T4300-basedGateway One ZX4800-02 from a few months back. The ZX4300-01 also sheds the older model's Intel graphics chip for an integrated ATI Radeon HD 4270. The other specs remain more or less the same, including wireless networking, 4GB of RAM, and a DVD burner. The one exception is the hard drive, which dropped from 750GB to a 640GB model.

Like the rest of Gateway's desktops, the ZX4300-01e is a fixed-configuration. It goes on sale the first week of June.

For the pricier ZX6900-01e, Gateway has stuck with Intel CPUs, but upgraded from a 2.3GHz Core 2 Quad CPU to the 2.93GHz Core i3 530. a dual-core chip that gets an extra pair of processing threads via Intel's HyperThreading tech. Hopefully the faster all-around clock speed will make up for any deficiencies in simulating a quad-core CPU.

Gateway has also bumped the optical drive in the 23-inch ZX6900-01e to a Blu-ray player/DVD burner combo drive, bringing Gateway's higher-end all-in-ones to par with HP's TouchSmart 600 and Sony's Vaio JS and L series. The new ZX6900-01e actually has an edge over its competitors in that it comes in at $1,019. That model's available now. A higher-end version with a Core i5 chip hits stores in June.