eMachines T series (Previous Models)
Stay away from the lowest-end model, and you'll find eMachines T series provides a great set of features for the budget class.
Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
eMachines T series
eMachines treads exclusively in the budget PC space, churning out a handful of fixed, retail configurations each fiscal quarter, all of which are priced below $600. The T6212 resides at the top of this quarter's line, with a price of $579 (after a $50 mail-in rebate). Compared to the T5026 released last quarter, the T6212 trades some performance for upgradability. To its credit, the T6212 is well designed and comes packed with features, including a DVD burner, an 8-in-1 media-card reader, and 512MB of 400MHz memory. We'd advise against the bottom-rung T3882 because of its piddling 256MB of memory. The middle child, the T3985, appears to be a good value with 512MB of 333MHz memory, a 160GB hard drive, and a DVD burner. Both the T3882 and T3985 use a low-end Intel Celeron D chip, whereas the T6212 uses a midrange AMD Athlon 64 3200+ chip. For basic computing chores, consider either the T3985 or T6212. On the whole, the eMachines budget T series provides excellent value for the money among budget PCs.
eMachines treads exclusively in the budget PC space, churning out a handful of fixed, retail configurations each fiscal quarter, all of which are priced below $600. The T6212 resides at the top of this quarter's line, with a price of $579 (after a $50 mail-in rebate). Compared to the T5026 released last quarter, the T6212 trades some performance for upgradability. To its credit, the T6212 is well designed and comes packed with features, including a DVD burner, an 8-in-1 media-card reader, and 512MB of 400MHz memory. We'd advise against the bottom-rung T3882 because of its piddling 256MB of memory. The middle child, the T3985, appears to be a good value with 512MB of 333MHz memory, a 160GB hard drive, and a DVD burner. Both the T3882 and T3985 use a low-end Intel Celeron D chip, whereas the T6212 uses a midrange AMD Athlon 64 3200+ chip. For basic computing chores, consider either the T3985 or T6212. On the whole, the eMachines budget T series provides excellent value for the money among budget PCs.