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Emachines 64-bit Athlons Now On Sale
tomhudson writes "According to zdnet,
emachines, the company geeks like to make fun of, finally has a toy we'd all like to get for Xmas -- an Athlon64 on the cheap :-)"
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The Compaq 8000Z, $1,189 after $100 rebate. Mail-order only.
eMachines have a bad rep, but they're not a bad unit. As a former Best Buy employee, the only problems we seen were the powersupply fans going out after 2 years and making a ton of noise.
Some of my former co-workers still have some of the first eMachines running as Linux servers to this day.
tons more?
hmm. applestore has " $1,799.00
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
800MHz frontside bus
512K L2 cache
256MB DDR333 128-bit SDRAM
Expandable to 4GB SDRAM
80GB Serial ATA
SuperDrive
Three PCI Slots
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem"
that is barebones. the emachine has "AMD's Athlon 64 3200+", "The $1,299 desktop also comes with 512MB of 400MHz double data rate synchronous dynamic RAM (DDR SDRAM) and a 160GB hard drive with a generous 8MB buffer for data, which helps boost performance." and "Included with the T6000 is an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card with 128MB of on-board memory, a CD burner, a DVD-ROM drive, an 8-in-1 memory card reader, seven USB (universal serial bus) ports and two IEEE 1394 or FireWire ports."
now, i might be STUPID and IGNORANT and a FOOL, but in my world half the mem, half the harddrive, suckier gfx card.. they don't really count as tons of more. did you even rtfa? or are you just fishing for a mac sympathy +5 insightful/informative? each to it's own and i'd love to have a g5 but it sure as hell doesn't have TONS more of stuff for 'few hundreds more'.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The specs are here, at least, and it was on the front of the desktop section.
3 90 092896&skuId=6186156&type=product
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1067
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
AMD will be introducing the 3000+ A64s next week. I am running off to snap a few pics of them now. All the details will be up on the Inq tomorrow morning, I don't want to scoop myself here though. :)
What I can say is:
Lots and lots of them, no shortages here.
They will be substantially cheaper than the current ~$400
Available to the public next week.
-Charlie
Athlons don't have any more of a tendency to overheat than Pentiums do now. Back before the AMD cpus had sufficient thermal production checks in various places, this was true. The Athlon 64 has just as much protection as the new Pentiums do, heat plate and all.
I am in the process of setting up an Athlon64 system. The 64-bit architecture is nice, in a techy coolness kind of way. And, the other architecture improvements, like more general purpose registers, are great.
But, the thing that pushed me to take the plunge was the "Cool 'n Quiet" feature of the chips.
The Athlon64 is the first mass-market / desktop chip to offer speed/voltage control that has been offered in laptop chips for quite a while. Based on processor load, CnQ will slow down the processor speed, in 200MHz increments, all the way down to 800MHz.
So, when you're doing light tasks like WWW browsing, MP3 playback, word processing, etc. the system slows down. When you're compiling, gaming, minidv editing, or other CPU hungry app, it goes up to full speed.
When the CPU slows down, obviously less power is used, and less heat is created. The system fans slow or stop, and the noise level goes way down.
Combine this with a fanless video card (e.g. GeForce FX 5200) and a quiet Seagate Barracuda hard drive, and you've got a very quite, but still powerful, system.
A couple months ago, I built myself a nice little cheap desktop for about $400. I'd say I did pretty well. Here are the specs:
Athlon XP 2000+ proc
VIA KT266 motherboard with 1 AGP/4 PCI slots, 6 USB ports, onboard S3 ProSavage8 video, 10/100 networking, and the usual motherboard stuff
256MB RAM
80GB WD hard drive
Floppy drive
16X DVD-ROM drive
48X CD-RW drive
Mini-tower case
Err sorry, when I said "built", I meant "bought an emachines T2082". Emachines USED to be crap, but these days they're using mostly off-the-shelf components. I have yet to find anything proprietary or icky about this computer. Sure I upped the RAM to 512MB and added a decent video card, but everything else is fine.
As for the Athlon64 system, it appears they released it TOO quietly... their web site doesn't even mention it.