Intro: why eMachines is unreliable

This review is pretty much the same review that I wrote for the eMonster 600 category. The eMonster 600 truly is a monster! EMachines built my system very poorly: The DVD drive was not connected to power or the IDE channel, the HD indicator was not soldered correctly and the advertised ATA-66 Hard disk is in fact a ATA-33 (judged solely by the installed 40 wire IDE cable, and ATA-66 requires a 80 wire IDE cable).

EMachines advertises a decent system, but does not follow through. The only name brand component inside is the Hard Disk. The video card is a no name card with a nVidia chip, and the modem is a basic Win-modem with a Lucent chip. The essential set works fine, but any kind of tweaking, extra software installation or upgrading should be done with caution, because the system crashes all the time with most of the upgrade I attempted (except the replacement of the Video card, read below).he system now has a P II 400 installed, and is running linux...

UPDATE (11/21/01):
I did a 3DMark2001 benchmark from madonion.com on the system, and it got a decent rating (1061, where a system running a P4 with GeForce3 rates around 3000). BUT, I discovered yet another way eMachines skimps on its systems: The Front Side Bus on the installed P3 is set at 66 mHz, not 100 mHz, as intel specifies. I suppose it's cheaper to install a slower Motherboard.

Original review:

WHY DID I BUY THIS PRODUCT?

My wife is in Grad School, and when our computer died a few months ago, I needed something quickly. It was paper-writing time! I purchased this computer after looking at similarly priced models by Compaq, HP and Micron.

WHO WOULD BENEFIT FROM THIS PRODUCT?

This is a great system for a college student or someone looking for a basic home computing system. The eMonster 600 is not the most expandable system. It only has 2 open PCI slots and one 5 1/4" drive bay. There no 3 1/2" drive bays, so you can only pick one extra peripheral (such as a CD-RW or a zip drive).

It comes with decent software that includes the Sun Office suite (which is compatible with the MS Office 2000 formats), Netscape 4.6, MS IE 5 and several other Internet enhancements, like hi-wire internet radio and real audio.

The keyboard Internet shortcuts are convenient, but are not customizable.

The system comes with a software DVD video decoder that works fine.

I never used the original nVidia Vanta graphics card, because I had a better one (the Diamond Viper 770 Ultra) from my old system. With the new card gaming is excellent. MS Flight Simulator 2000 runs at a very high frame rate. Homeworld looks stunning, and MechWarrior 3 is also very pretty.

There is a USB port and a game port behind a small cover of the front of the computer, which is a nice touch.

WHY DID YOU PURCHASE THIS PRODUCT OVER THE COMPETITION?

I was sold by the non-integrated graphics. All of the other systems in this price range had the intel 810 integrated AGP graphics system, which uses part of the system RAM. The eMonster 600 comes with an nVidia 8 MB AGP graphics card.

One very odd thing about the system: When I installed a memory upgrade and a CD-RW, I noticed the DVD drive was not connected to the power supply or the IDE cable! I hope this was an isolated incident, and it was not a problem for me, but a newbie might be baffled as to why the DVD drive does not work.

Other than the disconnected DVD drive, the system comes out of the box ready to use. The set up poster is very informative, and the manual covers everything from cleaning the box to installing a new HD, RAM or a second IDE device. The manual is well written.

WHICH ACCESSORIES WORK WELL WITH THIS PRODUCT?

I installed a Diamond Viper 770 Ultra (TNT 32 MB), a Netgear FA-310TX NIC, a 128 MB RAM DIMM (so the system has 192 MB) and a Cendyne CD-RW.
The installation of all of these items was straightforward and all devices work great.

The included speakers are a joke, but I had a Boka 1050 3 piece sound system from my old system.

WHICH PRODUCTS DO NOT WORK WELL?

Since I have a broadband connection at home, I tried to use a second NIC and make use of the Internet connection sharing (ICS) feature of Windows 98 SE, which caused all sorts of problems. Most of the problems had to do with very long boot times, VERY FREQUENT BLUE SCREENS, and systems crashes. After trying 2 different NIC's (a Netgear FA-311 and a 3com) I gave up. As a result, I restored the system software with the included CD-ROM, which was a piece of cake.

eMachines tech support was no help on this issue, saying simply that ICS is not a supported feature of eMachines systems.


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 799
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 501-600
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20