Home Phone and Internet $60/moNew eMachines desktops hit the shelves
eMachines announced three new budget PCs.
(Credit: CNET)eMachines has become so regular with its quarterly refreshes, it might be more newsworthy if they didn't announce new systems every three months. But rest assured, if you head to your friendly-neighborhood desktop retailer next week (and possibly even today), you'll find three new eMachines budget PCs on the shelves: the $500 T5230, the $450 T5062, and the $400 T3616. All come with a $50 mail-in rebate as well.
We've been lukewarm on eMachines the past few releases, mostly due to questionable CPU selection. This time, though, we're particularly impressed with the T5230 and its Athlon 64 X2 4400+ dual chip. We'll have our full review of that posted today or Monday, but our early impression, based on our benchmarks, is that eMachines has a performance coup on its hands with this system. The other two we're less high on, mostly because they still cling to single core chips.
For a while eMachines were making awesome laptops. When the AMD 64s came out and I had a big tax return burning a hole in my pocket the only 64bit laptops available were Sony ($2200) or eMachines ($1600) with identical HD, Ram, Graphics cards (with dedicated mem not shared like most new ones) and screen size. It's still good enough to run most games and its 2 1/2 yrs old now (has trouble with things like Oblivion tho heh). Too bad Gateway bought them almost immediately after they started making mid-high end laptops and then slapped their own logo on those machines. So for a while those AMD 64 bit laptops from Gateway were rebranded eMachines.
For a budget computer eMachines are fairly good, you dont need a $2000 overclocked/watercooled behemouth to just run a web browser and Word. Budget machines will never be looked upon nicely, they just arent as flashy as gaming machines, but once upon a time AMD was budget market oriented company also. Its sad that right as eMachines were starting to hit thier stride they got cut off at the knees by Gateway.
Again the Application and Driver Recovery discs are not included ...Gateway aka eMachine want you the consumer to pay $20.+SH to restore it ....BUY FROM SOME ONE ELSE.
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