eMachines T5062 review: eMachines T5062

Regardless which of the two eMachines systems you choose, you'll get the same inoffensive and functional case. Both systems provide a DVD burner and a multiformat media card reader, and inside you get a x16 PCI Express card slot should you want to add a graphics card on down the road. There's also room to add a second optical drive and another hard drive, but we would have liked to have seen more memory slots. The systems supply two DIMM slots, both of which are occupied by 512MB sticks. In order to expand the memory--and Vista gobbles memory resources--you'll need to replace what's there instead of simply adding to it.

In addition to the CPU, these two budget PCs differ in two other areas: hard drive and audio. The T5062 comes with a 160GB hard drive--smaller than the T5230's 250GB drive. Oddly, the lower-end T5062 features eight-channel sound to the T5230's six-channel audio.

Our Photoshop CS2 makes clear the advantages of dual-core processing. The single-core T5062 took more than twice as long to finish the test as the dual-core T5230. Perhaps you don't intend to run a high-end photo-editing app, but threaded applications like Photoshop that can take advantage of multiple processing cores are only going to become more common. Vista, itself, is multithreaded. iTunes is another multithreaded application, and as a result, the single-core T5062 took 16 percent longer than its dual-core doppelganger to complete the test. On Cinebench, a 3D rendering test, the two eMachines PCs finished in a statistical tie when testing on a single-core. The single-core T5062 obviously couldn't complete the multi-CPU portion of the test, but you can see how the performance of the other systems increases when running the same test over multiple processing cores.

eMachines' single year of parts-and-labor coverage is on a par with the industry average. And while it's not 24-7, we can certainly live with phone support that's open from 5 a.m. to midnight (PT), all week long, even if it's not toll-free. Better yet, via eMachines' live chat support, you can let a technician take control of your system to help diagnose and solve problems. eMachines desktops also feature Gateway's BigFix diagnostic tool, which notifies you of potential software conflicts and available updates.