There's a good chance your dealing with some
eMachines boxes when the "high-end" boasts a hefty $530 pricetag. The
Gateway-owned budget PC builder has a new lineup of desktops out today to support Windows Vista, ranging from the Celeron-based T3604 to the Pentium D T5224. In the low-end, the T3604 sports a Celeron D 356 3.33GHz processor, with 512MB (hardly adequate for blazing Vista performance) of RAM, a 120GB HDD, CD-RW/DVD combo drive, Intel 950 graphics, Vista Home Basic and a $350 pricetag after a $50 instant rebate. Next up is the T5082, which runs a Pentium 4 631 3GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 160GB HDD, a super-multi DVD drive, 15-in-1 card reader, ATI Radeon X300-based integrated graphics, Vista Home Basic and a $400 pricetag after the $50 rebate. Finally, the T5224 really does it up fancy for an eMachines box, including a Pentium D 820 proc running at 2.8GHz, 1GB of RAM, a 250GB HDD, super-multi DVD drive, card reader, Intel 950 graphics (bleh), and Vista Home Premium. The box is Viiv compatible, and will run you $530 after the $50 rebate. All of the PCs have 5.1 surround sound, DirectX 9.0 graphics, and a PCI Express x16 slot for upgrading the graphics -- which seems highly advisable. You should be able to find these things at retail outlets before too terribly long.
posted January 30th 2007 7:33PM
I saw all 3 them at Best Buy today. They run fine, except the cheaper version, even on basic celeron lags.
That's kind of stupid how the $530 model has worse graphics than the $400 model. But still, pretty good values.
What kind of power supplies do these usually have? I am wondering if it would almost be required to upgrade the PSU as well as installing a GPU.
It's usually around 300 watts.
If any one buys a emachine make sure to buy a QUALITY powersupply and that it gets enough cooling!
You misspelled "you're" here:
There's a good chance your dealing with some eMachines boxes when the "high-end" boasts a hefty $530 pricetag.
Not a bad deal, especially the last one.
^ Thank you Bryan, I was just coming in here to make a comment on that myself. It drives me nuts. I don't expect the people on blogs to write like professionals, but I do expect them to know fourth grade grammar. Your = possessive, as in "That's your computer," and you're = "you are".
What's with the eMachine bashing? A computer is a computer, except for the 1% of computer users that are totally l33t.
Also, it's a sad day in computing when we need statements like this: "with 512MB (hardly adequate for blazing Vista performance) of RAM." What is Vista doing that is so fantastic that requires upwards of 512 MB of RAM? Bloatware indeed.
Jeff, the fact that Vista is bloatware is irrelevant; the problem is that these are supposed to be "equipped for Vista", and at least one of them is not. I would argue that none of them are, since all have shit-or-worse graphics cards, but that's beside the point. I had hoped that Vista would spur the arrival of cheap-ish consumer-level machines with a decent 3D card, but so far it hasn't happened. People are still selling laptops (and apparently desktops) with useless Intel integrated graphics as "Vista-ready". We'll have to wait for the wave of consumer backlash when they realize their new computers can't use roughly half of what Vista is supposed to do for them.
'Your = possessive, as in "That's your computer," and you're = "you are".'
Thanks guys. It's always great to take a break from the insightful comments on the posts here and read a little spelling primer.
I recently helped a friend set a t5082 that he just bought from best buy, even after i removed all the unnecessary startup junk it still runs dirt slow. within 5 mins it had already crashed..not impressed. i think my old AMD K2 6 runs faster. oh well.
I just bought an emachine T3604. All I do is email and ebay. But I need speed for ebay, I sell alot. I have not opened it and am wondering if this will do the job?? Thanks!!