Gateway 2000's newest system appears to be a real price breakthrough --
for $3895 you get a 486/33 with EISA bus, 8 mb of ram (expandable to
64 mb), a 340 mb Maxtor SCSI hard drive, Diamond Speedstar Plus video
card with 1 mb of ram, 14" 1024x768 non-interlaced monitor, Microsoft
Mouse, 16450 serial port UART, the usual floppy drives, DOS 5.0,
Windows 3.0.

That's just about my dream machine, at a price way lower than anything
comparable that I've seen -- save for a couple of reservations.  First
of all, it's available only in a desktop case -- no tower.  I'm 
concerned about that both with regard to expandability and cooling.
Secondly, it comes with a 200 watt power supply -- somewhat lower
than what some other vendors offer.  As I envision adding peripherals
over time -- tape backup, CD rom, maybe another (or larger) hard
drive -- should I be concerned about maxing out the power supply?

In view of the generally good word-of-mouth Gateway has been getting
here and elsewhere, I'm real tempted to go ahead and place an order,
but I'm wondering if Gateway might be cutting corners.

13 responses total.

To me, it looks like someone finally figured out how to make a EISA 
motherboard at a semi-reasonable price.  Or simply cut a very nice deal
with Gateway. 

I'd ask for a Quantum PRO425S instead of the Maxtor 340mb, and a Diamond
SpeedStar HiColor instead of the Diamond SpeedStar Plus, but otherwise
it sounds like one wicked machine.  (There have been complaints about the
Gateway NI monitor on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware, but it ought to be
livable.  I'm sure we'd all rather have a NEC FG-series, but for the price..)

200 watts is plenty.  A 3.5" tape backup (Colorado 250mb) won't eat much
juice, and a CD-ROM couldn't be too bad, either (not with portable CD players
running off batteries).  'Sides, you wouldn't use the tape and CD at once. 
Your biggest problem is going to be open drive bays.. at worst, you can
always give PC Products a call and we'll sell you a very nice BIG tower for
a very reasonable price (I'm working there part time now.  We don't have an
EISA system, but we do have a top-notch 486/33 ISA). 

Methinks your biggest problem will be writing the check for both such a
machine AND Unix <grin>... (how expensive is it to get into Unix on a PC?
I'd really like to run it on my 386/40, but Minix and Coherent just don't
cut it..)

I tried to respond a while ago, but there was a crash...
Hurm...
John, did you call Gateway, or have you only read the add? I'd be surprised 
if they weren't willing to throw it in a tower with 250W, for a bit extra.

Unix for the 386 generally runs around $1000 to $1500, including a
2-user runtime OS and the development system (aka C compiler and
other such goodies).  Depending on who you buy from, X and TCP/IP
might or might not be included, and might or might not be available
for more money.  For SysVr3, I'd probably go with SCO Unix, and for
SysVr4, I'd probably go with Dell.

Assuming the Maxtor is an LXT-340S, it certainly sounds acceptable
to me -- I have an LXT-213S (a 212MB SCSI drive) and have been quite
satisfied.  The only complaint I might have is that the wires
connecting the LED in the drive bezel to the connector on the drive
are quite thin, and tend to break off with just a little wiggling.
However, this is definitely not a big concern, since you aren't going
be plugging in and unplugging the drive LED all that often anyway.
My only worry would be that 340MB isn't enough for Unix, X, the
development stuff, Usenet, and so forth, but for an ordinary home
machine it might be adequate.  Certainly, SCSI lets you keep your
options open and add more drives in the future.

I'd make sure that you're getting a good SCSI controller; one of the
possible places they're cutting corners is there.  A reasonable
SCSI controller (Adaptec 1542B, or a Bustek if you want an EISA
controller) will probably run you $300 or so, but is worth every penny
in the data transfer speed.  On the other hand, cheap SCSI controllers
(Seagate ST-02, Future Domain 8-bit, etc.) are probably only $50 or
so, but will drag your system performance into the mud.  Definitely
make sure your SCSI controller knows how to do bus-mastering, and if
you're going to run Unix I'd recommend the Adaptec or Bustek controllers.
This also makes sure that your SCSI controller will work with the
SCSI tape drive you buy, as well as the SCSI CD-ROM that you're planning
on getting.

(However, make sure that the Adaptec will work in the Gateway.  I've
heard that some motherboard chipsets -- particularly the Chips &
Technologies one -- have trouble with the Adaptec.  Since Bustek is
an Adaptec clone, I would expect problems there, too.  However, I'm
not sure if this will have an effect in an EISA machine or not; everything
I've heard applies only to ISA machines.  Best to get an assurance
from Gateway that it will work before buying, though.)

Colorado tape drive -- yuk!  I've seen these have rather, uh, "interesting"
configuration problems and failure modes.  You don't want a mini-
cartridge drive under Unix, anyway.  Your best bet would be to get
the Archive Viper 2150S, which is a SCSI tape drive (meaning you don't
need to buy yet another controller, which takes up yet another slot,
yet another IRQ, yet another range of I/O ports, and yet another
DMA channel), and is also compatible with most of the cartridge tape
drives out there.  It does 150MB with a DC6150 tape and 250MB with
a DC6250/DC600XL tape.  Beyond 250MB, you're probably looking at either
a 550MB cartridge tape drive or a DAT/DVT drive.  DAT and DVT are both
very expensive; plan on paying $1500 or so for a good drive.  One
disadvantage of the 150/250MB drive is that, with a 340MB hard drive,
your backups will probably not fit on one tape once you get everything
loaded on this disk.  This can make backups a real drag, since you can't
just throw a tape in the machine and walk away, but have to be around
every so often to change the tape.  It still beats the hell out of
floppies, though.  (The Archive Viper can also read, but not write,
the QIC-24 and QIC-11 (60MB and 45MB, respectively) distribution
formats that most software -- X11R5, SunOS, SCO Unix, etc. -- comes on.)

I wouldn't recommend running Unix very long without a tape drive;
even if your disk is fine it still makes it much easier to repartition,
etc., as well as giving you that warm fuzzy feeling at night.

Thanks for the input.

Re #2:  Yes, I talked to a sales rep. at Gateway.  The unit is not
available at all in a tower configuration.

I'll ask about controllers and such.

My plan is to get Unix eventually, but not right away, as there
appear to be some new developments on the horizon in the 386/486
domain.  When I get Unix, I'll also get a tape drive.

Not available in a tower? How silly of them.

They probably have a reason.  I'm curious what it is, as their other
models are available in towers.

I'm curious, too. Boards too long, or what?
That's weird.

They probably have a ton of desk-top cases to get rid of so they packaged
this ?HOT? model in a desk-top case only.

Yeah, that could be it.

Well, I called Gateway back today with some questions inspired by
the responses I've been getting here and elsewhere, and the sales-
person informed me that as of yesterday, the machine is available
in a tower case.  So I went ahead and ordered it.

The SCSI controller is an Adaptek 32-bit EISA controller.

He said it'd be about three weeks to delivery.  A nice Christmas
present.

Dang. No doubt.

wow! what a good deal!!!!!!!!

Yep.  It's amazing how those prices drop.

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