Gateway and its eMachines brand introduced its first-quarter PC lineup this month, including a desktop featuring a hybrid Blu-ray Disc/HD DVD drive.
The Gateway GM5664 desktop, available immediately with a $1,149 suggested retail, sports the Hybrid-SuperMultiDrive that allows HD DVD and Blu-ray discs to be viewed, and it can burn to all other CD and DVD media. The unit adds a built-in TV tuner and remote.
The company did not reply to questions as to whether it will continue to equip its models with a hyrid HD DVD/Blu-ray drive in light of the fact that Toshiba, the primary backer of HD DVD, decided last week to no longer support the format.
Other features are an AMD quad-core processor, an ATI Radeon HD 2400XT graphics with 256MB of memory, 3GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive.
The step-down model is the GT5662, shipping now with a $749 suggested retail. It has the same AMD processor, but only a 500GB hard drive and a conventional DVD burner.
Gateway’s eMachine line also gained two new models: the T3642, priced at $349, and the T5246 for $429.
The entry-level T3642 has an AMD Athlon 64-bit dual-core processor, 1GB DDR2 memory, 250GB hard drive and a DVD burner.
The T5246 has 2GB of DDR2 memory and a 400GB hard drive.
