eMachines EZ1601 Review

If you have a budget of only $400 for a desktop PC and monitor, you're not going to get any high-powered hardware, but at least you don't have to settle for a boring generic box. The eMachines EZ1601 is an attractive all-in-one that builds a PC into an 18.5-inch LCD monitor, looking for all the world like a slightly scaled-down version of one of HP's swank TouchSmart desktops, though it doesn't have a touch screen.

Actually, the EZ1601 looks even more like two other easel-style PCs, the Asus Eee Top ET1602 and MSI Wind Top AE1900. Like them, it's a nettop -- the familiar innards of a netbook, including an Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, and 802.11b/g WiFi, built into a desktop device. Like the MSI, it includes the optical drive -- a DVD±RW burner -- not found in any netbook.

It undercuts the Asus and MSI all-in-ones by $100 to $150 because it has neither a touch screen nor kiosk-style software to match their message centers, photo managers, and other apps suitable for use in a kitchen or family room. Instead of being a digital home hub, the eMachines is content to be a conventional Windows XP Home Edition PC -- a family's third or fourth PC, presumably, used for Web apps, e-mail, and light productivity work, without the horsepower for gaming or video editing.

As such, it's a surprisingly likable little system -- but perhaps not the best use of a $400 budget.

One Plug and Play

Easel folded, the black-clad EZ1601 measures roughly 15 by 19 by 2.5 inches and weighs just nine pounds -- we found it helpful to steady the PC with one hand lest it skid across the desk while inserting or unplugging a USB flash drive with the other hand. Setup is a matter of plugging in the PS/2 mouse and keyboard and connecting the power cable (with notebook-style power brick). As with a growing number of desktops, WiFi is built in so there's no need for laptop envy -- if you have a wireless router, you can get online without stringing your cable or DSL modem to the system's Ethernet port.

The Ethernet port is in a rear-panel cutaway, along with the two PS/2 ports, three USB 2.0 ports, and an audio jack. USB ports four and five are on the system's left side, as are microphone and headphone jacks, an SD/MMC/MS flash-card slot, and screen brightness controls. The DVD±RW drive is on the right.

While a wireless keyboard and mouse would be a more elegant fit with the one-piece PC, economy dictates a corded black keyboard and scroll-wheel mouse. At least the latter is a smooth-performing optical mouse, not a mechanical-ball antique as supplied with the last eMachines we tested, and the keyboard has a rattly but comfortable typing feel. It also has handy audio volume controls, though no fancy multimedia-control or program-launch keys.

The EZ1601's display's 1,366 by 768 resolution fits the 16:9 aspect ratio of HD video, not that you'll find a Blu-ray player or an HDTV tuner in this price range (though QuickTime 720p videos ran without hiccup, as did regular DVD movies). Text was crisp and colors were perky, though we wished for one more notch on the brightness control -- white backgrounds were merely white, not washday-miracle white.

Behind the Screen

Except for the addition of an optical drive, the eMachines' internals have the cookie-cutter familiarity of most netbooks: Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor with 512K of Level 2 cache; 1GB of DDR2 memory; a 160GB Western Digital hard disk; and Intel's 945GSE chipset with its legendarily slow GMA 950 integrated graphics.

Performance-wise, therefore, it's no surprise to see the EZ1601 post benchmark numbers in the middle of the netbook, hence bottom of the PC pack -- a PCMark05 score of 1,512, SysMark 2007 Preview rating of 37, seventeen and a half minutes to render Cinebench R10's sample scene. (For comparison's sake, a cutting-edge quad-core desktop can do the last job in something over a minute.) The idea of playing modern games on the nettop is madness (its 3DMark06 score is 83), although the ten-year-old Quake III Arena ran at a passable 57 frames per second.

More realistically, as long as you're cool with dialogue boxes that take a second or two to pop up instead of appearing instantly, the eMachines is fine for word processing, Web surfing, minor image editing (think cropping and red-eye touch-ups, not Photoshop filter effects), and all the other everyday tasks entrusted to netbooks, as well as DVD viewing and MP3 playing.

eMachines' software bundle includes the trial versions of Norton Internet Security 2009 and Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007, as well as Google Desktop and Toolbar, CyberLink's PowerToGo and PowerDVD CD/DVD utilities, and spamware like the WildTangent game service and NetZero and eBay links.

An Upgrade-Free Zone

All told, the EZ1601 is a nicely designed mini-desktop, and with a single change, we'd give it a thumbs-up: Anything posing as a desktop PC needs more than 1GB of memory. If only the eMachines came with 2GB, we'd be tickled with it. But as is, probably due to Intel's and Microsoft's restrictions on what defines a nettop and what's allowed to ship with Win XP instead of Vista, it's a sealed envelope, without the accessible or upgradeable RAM that even netbooks have.

By contrast, eMachines' own EL1300G-02W desktop deal at Wal-Mart gets you a slimline PC with 1GB of memory that can be upgraded (though you can't upgrade its graphics or anything else), plus a larger 20-inch LCD monitor, for $398.

Or of course, if you insist on one-piece design, there're these newfangled things called notebooks. A glance at BestBuy.com turned up two 15.6-inch laptops with the same DVD burner, same-size hard drive, and same 1,366 by 768 screen resolution as the EZ1601, for the same $400 each -- a Compaq with a single-core Celeron CPU and 3GB of RAM and a Dell with a dual-core Pentium and 2GB. Either should give a more satisfying computing experience with the bonus of portability.

And the eMachines? If they'd stick an inexpensive dual-core chip and 3GB of memory into it and sell it for $450, they'd have a dandy little desktop. \

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