On the heels of the gaming-oriented Gateway FX7020, we get a few more desktop announcements this morning from recent Acer-acquisition Gateway, as well as from its eMachines subsidiary.

The most interesting component of this news is the hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD drive coming to Gateway's new, retail-only GM5664 desktop. The system includes a quad core AMD Phenom 9600 CPU, a 1TB hard drive, and a 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT graphics card for $1,150. That's not a bad configuration for the price, especially the hard drive. However, if it's the Blu-ray and HD DVD playback you're after, the $949 HP Pavilion SlimLine s3330f has a better price and a more living room-friendly chassis. The similar, non-HD, 500GB hard drive-equipped Gateway GT5662 also debuted today for $750.

As for eMachines, it remains committed to bringing you dual-core PCs on the cheap. We're glad to see that it has embraced AMD's full-fledged Athlon X2 chips, rather than the half-baked AMD Sempron chips it had lying around the warehouse. The T5246 offers the Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2GB of RAM, a 400GB hard drive, and a dual-format DVD burner for $430. That's about as much computer as you would need for basic Windows Vista usage. Further down the budget scale, eMachines still has a single-core PC to offer with the $350 T3642 and its Athlon 64 4000+ chip.

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