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64 Bit Athlon Notebooks Hit the Market
Omega1045 writes "Our friends at News.com.com.com are reporting that one of the first notebooks powered by the 64 bit Athlon will be made by (drumroll, please) eMachines. Slashdot has mentioned eMachines venture into 64 bit Athlon technology before. You also might note from this past press release that eMachines claims to be the 3rd biggest PC maker in the US. Hopefully this will have the dual effect of pushing the new chip into the market, and keeping it afforable of laptop junkies like me."
> I don't have much need for a 64 bit laptop
I think I could find something to do with it. 64-bit, 802.11g, USB2 and Firewire, vertical scroller (essential!), and my favorite: a built-in 6-in-1 media reader. The price is right too. Mmmmm... I don't like AMD stuff, but this thing could quickly make me a convert.
Not everybody shopping for a 64 bit notebook would buy something cheesy like an eMachines laptop.
VoodooPC has been selling their high end m:855 for some time now. Based on the Athlon 64, it also has ATI Mobility 9600 Graphics Pro chipset.
VoodooPC has been doing this for over three months already.
hypersonic pc has been selling one for a while as well. They seem to be pretty decent machines, might by one with my tax refund. -siniset
15.4", 1280x800? You don't seem to understand that that is the industry standard for widescreen laptops.
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600? The only thing higher than it in the Mobility line is one with twice the RAM, which gets the name Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro. (Voodoo didn't actually know WHAT a 9600 Pro was at the time that they called theirs a Pro - nobody did - but it is really the exact same thing as what's in this eMachines)
512MB RAM? My school runs XP on 128, and it's still snappier than Damn Small Linux on 96. 512 is plenty for the average user.
AC-97 Audio? Sure, it's only capable of 2.1 sound, but when a laptop only has 2.0, and those speakers suck (I've read that the m:855's speakers suck ass), do you really need a high end sound card?
Paying more than $1550? Why? Voodoo's box has a pretty paint job, a DVD burner, and a 15" 1400x1050 (IMHO, that's painfully small) (on top of what the eMachines offers), for OVER $1000 more.
I've had good experiences with them as far as reliability. I still have a 500is that runs fine, it's been abused in nearly every way possible and upgraded as much as it can possibly be upgraded without throwing in a powerleap kit. Many of the upgrades were listed as not possible in the service manual, but http://e4all.info/ has more information (on older ones) and the upgraders forum has a lot of people that have tried everything they can to make them still useable beyond their years. Most of the older ones can at least be upgraded to 512MB with very careful ram selection. That has kept the old 500is useable, even if it is slow. It's perfectly fine as another box to have up to surf the web and what-not. I have some even slower hardware taking care of other task as well.;-)
...it's still a gamble on future OS's.
There are many things that were cheap in a lot of their older (and still in their present) models. (A lot of them are the typical things that the big makers skimp on. Severely under rated power supplies, proprietary power supplies, POS modems that have no excuse for existing in any machine, if they come with a network card replace it with something else, ram modules that may or may not be worth keeping [though they seem to be getting away from the awful ram they were putting in a few years ago]... These are not severe issues in most of them, but the proprietary power supplies in them are a pain to work around if you are going to cram a mess of drives in them. Don't expect Emachines to give you a pin out for the power supply either.) I've not known anyone who had one of their laptops though.
The biggest disppointment with Emachines is *support*. The one thing that you may have trouble with is getting support for new OS's that comes out down the road. Emachines is somewhat unreliable about supporting their hardware beyond the OS it was shipped with. This can be very bad news in a laptop, and it can be awful news if you ever have to have your laptop worked on for warranty work.
I haven't heard the kind of horror stories I've heard about Compaq laptops in terms of getting them worked on, but based on my experiences with them
It's very hard to top Compaq for the worst possible hardware, worst possible support, worst ownership experience, worst batch of proprietary hardware...in "consumer grade" products. Emachines is well above that fold for the price range they are in. Even with the corners they cut, it's never going to be as unpleasant as that to own one. For the price range they are in, they are decent enough.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Not yet. But, the Athlon64 running in 32-bit mode is still faster than the fastest AthlonXP and gives the fastest P4 a run for its money.
Plus, all it takes to gain full 64-bit support is a re-install with a 64-bit aware OS. Gotta love when updating a piece of software gives you access to even more of the hardware.
I think it's the M305 or something. It was the first one they offered. Bought it at Best Buy for about $1000. Had better graphics and more memory than the others in the price range, which is why I bought it in the first place.
So far, it's been a trooper. It's rock solid and reliable, battery life is good. It's also fairly thin and easy to handle. I like the widescreen a lot, as it makes the whole laptop less deep (every inch counts when you fly coach.)
I love it. If this one ever gives out, I'd buy the 64 bit one in a second.
Perhaps this would be funny if it was anyway true. G4 and P4 laptops generate far more heat than Athlon 64 laptops. And well, also Athlon 64 laptops have not just hit the market, they have been available for several months. This is only the first on available from a Tier 1 vendor, and also in Best Buy. Not to mention it was not CNet/ZDNet that broke this news. It was www.AMDZone.com.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com