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."

Comments

good for everyone

[ArgumentBoy]

I don't have much need for a 64 bit laptop, but I welcome this because it will naturally drive down the prices of what I might actually buy. Way to go, eMachines.

Re:good for everyone

[AssClown2520]

The price is excellent I have to admit. But the specs seem lagging in areas that to me are just as important as the processor.

A 15.4" display with 1280x800 resolution? Coupled with a ATI 9600 video card.

512MB Memory - This is barely enough to run XP now days.

AC/97 Audio - Actually the sound is the last frontier for all Laptops. I have yet to see a laptop that offers a high quality sound card. I go external.

Anyway, I love seeing the 64-bit processor being put into laptops. But I will wait until I can get one with other high end components to go along with it... and yes, I know I will be paying more than $1500.00 for it.

Re:good for everyone

[hendridm]

My experiences have been different. I've owned roughly 5 Intel and 5 AMD systems in the past 12 years and have had nothing but trouble with the AMD systems. It started with the K6 and K6-2. Unstable and subpar performance. I moved on to the Athlon, at the time touted as the Pentium-killer. Constant system crashes and overheating with a board and chipset that got rave reviews on most of the hardware sites. Fed up, I vowed never to get AMD again. My next system was a Pentium 4, and it ran like clockwork. One day I decided to build a toolbox PC. I found the perfect board for the toolbox I was using, but unfortunately, it was an AMD board. I said, "what the hell" and bought an Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz). I tried TWO different boards that were warranted for up to 2100+ processors and they both wouldn't clock higher than 1.33GHz. Waste of time, money, shipping, and grief. If I wanted a system that slow I would have gone with an Athlon 1500 or a Celeron 2.0GHz for the same price. TWO DIFFERENT BOARDS (one Biostar, one Shuttle) and my 2100+ wouldn't clock at higher than that of a 1500. So pretty much every AMD system I've ever owened was a spectacular failure.

Before someone says, "you're either an idiot, or you buy shitty hardware! I'm using a system right now that has an uptime of 3446543215 days!" then I congratulate you on your luck. When I buy hardware, I generally read reviews (with the exception of the Toolbox PC, where I went for more modest parts). Perhaps I've read all the wrong reviews and took the wrong recommendations from colleagues, however, I use the same technique and criteria to choose my Intel systems and I have had nothing but excellent quality and performance with almost every Intel system I've owned (the one exception was a disasterous experiment with Intel's on-board choice of a SATA controller (Silicon Logic), but I won't go into that here. I had that board for about 3 days before returning it).

YMMV, and it almost certainly will since it is one of the three things everyone raves about here on Slashdot - Linux, AMD, and OS X.

Anyone comment on linux support?

[Frequanaut]

For the k8t800m chipset or ati mobility 9600 on said laptop???

I've got about $1500 and an urge to upgrade.

price

[rogabean]

Quote:
"Hopefully this will have the dual effect of pushing the new chip into the market, and keeping it afforable of laptop junkies like me."

This is the only part I can see as a plus to this. However I would take a guess that it will do little to the latter, in that most companies know E-Machines general reputation with the people who would be first in line to buy a 64 bit laptop, so I don't forsee that they will try to compete with E-Machines in the price category for some time.

Re:price

[garcia]

You know, for all the bad things that I hear about e-machines I can't find a single problem with the one I have been using since 11/2002. It has been up, without fail, running Linux since that day (only down for routine kernel upgrades).

Sure it was cheap, came with a bunch of crap I didn't really need, but it was a gift and it works fine.

The people who are going to be first in line to purchase a 64bit laptop are going to purchase an e-machine because that's who's offering it currently. I don't see Dell coming out saying they are, do you? In fact, I have better success with my e-machine than I did with my Dell laptop. After dealing with Dell for that particular machine I will *never* *ever* buy from them again.

I would go with the e-machine without a hesitation.

Re:price

[LnxAddct]

No...Dell sucks with businesses too. I had a whole bunch of Dell computers shipped to my firm to replace the older computers. Then I got the paperwork and they were charging us twice the amount that it should have been! Needless to say many eyebrows rose when they got wind of this. I called Dell and they realized that it was a problem on their end, they said they fixed it. Then a month later we received another invoice from them stating our overdue balance. The crazy thing is that we didn't have a balance and were told to disregard them and that it was noted in their system. We had payed for the computers in one lump sum to avoid things like this but we kept getting invoices for about 4 more months. Whether its still on our credit report I'm not sure, but it was stating that we owed Dell money (and alot of it) which is Not a Good Thing (tm). Moral of the story: I only order from Gateway now for business and Emachines for home.
Regards,
Steve

Good.

[cK-Gunslinger]

I'm glad to see some OEMs going away from the relatively expensive, and in the case of the Celeron, weak Intel architecture. You can build a heck of a General-Purpose / Gaming / Development machine based on AMD CPUs for next to nothing. You can easily put together an AMD64 3000+ / Radeon 9600 / 19" monitor system for under a grand.

I hope to see more PC makers go this route. Diversity is good. Now, if they would start considering alternate OSes as well...

Re:Regarding "desktop-replacement"

[W32.Klez.A]

This comment is a direct repost of this one.

Great, but should I wait before going 64 bit?

[Wingit]

I live in a Pentium 350 world and home and have been limping along, quite happily actually. I admin a Win2K network at work so keep one foot planted there, and have been learning and living on a steady diet of Linux the rest of the time. While eMachines don't thrill me, I am thinking more and more that I should postpone any upgrades until I can truly dive into the 64 bit world. I realize I will be stuck running plenty of 32 bit applications, but is my wait worthwhile? I am really getting the itch to get into serious gaming again but (obviously) my current system is not up to much more than the Ultima Online I played for 5 years. Perhaps this question fit better as an Ask Slashdot question, but I didn't feel it was worthy to stand on its own so I welcom your comments.

Old news..

[Snotboble_]

A Danish company called Amitech has had an Athlon 64 powered notebook since August 13 2003.

It does however suffer from the 90W power drain that the regular Athlon 64 imposes, so don't move too far away from that power outlet.

Bum rap

[SuDZ]

Now I know the big deal is to hate Emachines but do many of you have experience with them? I knew a lot of people in my area were buying them because the price was low (friends and students) because that was all they could afford. At first I had the same feeling of "eek, I have heard bad things", but once they got them setup and running they really had no issues with them. I mean they were using them for what they were designed for. Things like email, IM, web browsing and minor games. These things lasted for a while, usually until it was time to upgrade or what not. A lot of people I know still have them.

Based on what I saw they took the abuse of a home computer and ran fine with no problems outside or regular software issues. Why do they seem to get such a bum rap on here?

SuDZ

I've said it before, I'll say it again

[Theatetus]

eMachines are just a crappy as Dells or Gateways but you avoid the brand tax with them. Unlike Dell and Gateway, eMachines doesn't pretend it's selling you some top of the line system but is honest about the fact that you're getting the house Chianti, as it were.

Re:Regarding "desktop-replacement"

[edalytical]

Sounded like a advertisement to me. I wonder if he gets paid or not.

So where are these 64 bit machines on their site?

[nial-in-a-box]

When the first story about the 64 bit desktop machine from eMachines broke, I looked on their website and it was noticeably absent from the products section. It is still not there and neither is this new laptop. I'm guessing I'm just stupid and missed where it said that they're only selling these models through Best Buy or something like that. It just makes me wonder about the quality if they won't even show them on their website. I'm having trouble coming up with a similar occurrence anywhere else. For a company that does all sales through retail outlets such as Best Buy and Circuit City, it seems odd that they would not mention their flagship products on their own site. I don't think this is a conspiracy, I just can't understand the reasoning here. I have an email out to them seeking some sort of answer, but hopefully someone here will have some insight.

Re:Regarding "desktop-replacement"

[expro]

My 12" powerbook has an amazing keyboard.

But when I buy a laptop, I want portability, a small display, etc., and I fail to see the point of laptops with huge power requirements, displays, etc.

For a desktop I will buy a flat pannel if that is what I want for a non-portable solution -- rather than a 21" CRT, I would double-head with two 19" CRTs for even better resolution at lower cost.

A "desktop replacement" is a laptop that does not make good laptop in my book, but it is not uncommon to see them in the stores either bought by users who don't need good portability or don't know the difference.

WTF is Sun waiting for?

[haggar]

I see more and more systems with Opterons and Athlon 64s coming to the market. And all that while, Sun, who would have all the best interest to make some Opteron systems available ASAP, are dragging their feet.

Sun really needs to get these low and midrange Opteron servers out as soon as they possibly can, while HP is in the Itanium mess! HP was hoping for the Itanium to hit the mass-market and be real cheap to manufacture. Instead, they have by their hands a CPU that's even more expensive than the PA-RISC. If Sun had a shred of strategic insight, they'd be selling cheap 4 and 8 way Opteron servers with Solaris x86-64 right about now.

I am a huge Sun fan, actually, but some of their management moves seem to be ridicolous (Cobalt aquisition anyone?).

Dell -- it is all about the warranty

[appleLaserWriter]

eMachines are just a crappy as Dells or Gateways but you avoid the brand tax with them.

With Dell you get a three year 24 hour warranty. While Dell has never serviced my laptop warranty claims within 24 hours, they often get them within 48. And they will replace parts until the machine works.

Re:Dell -- it is all about the warranty

[dbIII]

With Dell you get a three year 24 hour warranty.

Yes, but you use up that 24 hours on hold will Dell support in a lot less than three years. I've spent six hours on hold over various calls spread over weeks and talked to people on three continents just trying to buy a spare loptop battery - I wouldn't have perservered so much, but I'd made the mistake of giving them my own credit card number, they charged up front - and I wasn't goping to let go until either the battery came through or I got my money back (which happened two months later). A local supplier, in a two minute call, apologised that it wouldn't be available until the following morning. I picked it up about ten hours later.

So Dell promises, but it can't deliver

Sometimes quite literally.

Bought one

[TallGeek]

I bought one of these on Thursday at Best Buy. Haven't had much time to play with it, but it seems like a very solid machine with a nice screen. Moving windows and resizing them is less responsive than on my 17" PowerBook, which is not a good sign, given the much higher Athlon64 clock speed. For the moment, I'll blame Windows.

The machine has all the features I need, though I'd like Bluetooth. The 802.11 works great (I don't have a .11g base station, but the .11b mode is fine).

I'm looking into 64-bit Linux distros to install to see how well that works...

No idea about battery life yet, but it gets pretty warm on my lap!

RMA rates....?

[crimson30]

Well spoken. It's nice to see some clear examples instead of "AMD sucks".

But, being the AMD fan I am, I must say that perhaps your problems are more due to bad luck than anything, since RMA rates for motherboards are significantly higher than other components.

And so this brings me to a question... is there a site that gives statistics on RMA rates?

- - - - - - - - - -

P.S. - The following riposte is a cut and paste of a previous slashdot post:

Pentium Floating-point division bug [ku.edu] (it's close enough, isn't it?)
Invalid Operand Instruction crashes original Pentiums [iss.net] Pentium crash codes
Pentium Pro/II still having problems with floats [ddj.com] Unable to convert to int
Pentium III can't even start up [bbc.co.uk] You went faster with an 8088
SSE is great for when you want your PIII to crash [zdnet.co.uk] Pretty blue screens abound.
PIII Xeon, quality you can count on, except at high CPU usage [macworld.com] Watch the task manager, Phil.
Yay, PIII MTH crashes! [com.com] Does MTH stand for Meth?
Total Recall 2: PIII@1.13GHz [com.com] Fastest crashes ever.
Total Recall 3: PIII Xeons@800/900Mhz [com.com] More Xeon quality in a box.
Total Recall 4: CC820 [techweb.com] How many defects? Can't recall...
Pentium 4 overwriting data [zdnet.co.uk] Hope it wasn't something important.
Pentium 4 chipset bug [com.com] Fast video performance? Naaa.
P4 Oracle/Sun problems [indiana.edu] More workarounds than work
Itanium shipments halted [theinquirer.net] That's an expensive oops.

Just so nobody gets any ideas that Intel is perfect...