eMachines T2865 Review

Making Noise in the Retail Market

We're going to get hate mail from New Mexico again. Last December, inspired by a surprisingly positive experience with a $599 review system, we included a line in our year-end roundup complimenting the new management of budget vendor eMachines for continuing "to whittle away at its previous owners' toxic reputation with bargain-priced, well-equipped desktops." That brought a barrage of outraged e-mails from a Santa Fe computer consultant who called us criminally incompetent for even suggesting that consumers might consider eMachines.

We tried to reason with the fellow. We pointed out that yes, we were aware of -- indeed, the review and the compliment both noted -- the cheap, chintzy construction of eMachines' offerings circa 1998-2000 and necessity for a "leap of faith to forget eMachines' former eLemons." We remarked that sometimes companies make comebacks -- just as carmaker Hyundai, while not exactly stealing sales from Mercedes, has shed the stigma of its early, awful Excel. But our arguments were in vain; the angry expert insisted that we were ignorant and that eMachines was, now and forever, irreparable garbage.

The rest of you may be interested in reading about the eMachines T2865, the top of the company's 2003 holiday-shopping-season lineup. This desktop has an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.08GHz) processor and half a gigabyte of memory. It comes with a hefty 160GB hard disk and 4.7GB DVD burner -- not just any DVD burner, but a DVD±RW drive that bridges the rival recordable formats -- plus front-panel slots for digital cameras' or PDA's flash-memory cards. It competes with HP and Sony home PCs priced in the $900 to $1,100 (without monitor) range. It costs $720.

What's the catch? There are several, mostly defining the T2865 as a workhorse rather than workstation: While its CPU boasts AMD's "Barton" core with 512MB of Level 2 cache, it also has a 333MHz front-side bus rather than the 400MHz bus of the latest Athlon XP 3200+ chip (the 512MB of standard memory is PC2700 or DDR333, not DDR400). The cooling fan could be quieter. The Western Digital Protege hard disk spins at 5,400 instead of deluxe models' 7,200 rpm.

The Nvidia nForce2 chipset provides merely adequate GeForce 4 MX integrated graphics -- though there's an AGP slot for more game-worthy upgrades, something missing from many economy-model PCs (including eMachines' second-quarter lineup earlier this year). And digital video buffs will note there's no IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port to connect a camcorder, though there are five USB 2.0 ports for external storage or other devices.

But let's recheck that bottom line: $720, for a system that would've been a dream machine a year ago and is still a highly respectable, high-performance home PC with a DVD±RW drive, big hard disk, attractive multimedia keyboard, and solid software bundle. The T2865 won't impress hardware buffs who can afford an Athlon FX rig with dual Serial ATA hard drives, but it'll satisfy consumers' needs while leaving them enough money to afford a nice LCD monitor.

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