eMachines T3085 review: eMachines T3085

Review summary
Pick up the eMachines T3085 with the E15T flat panel for a combined $968 (after rebates), and you'll get a system that's well suited out of the box to handle most office chores and some multimedia tasks, such as editing photos, ripping MP3s, and burning DVDs. And with its open AGP slot, fast Athlon XP processor, multiformat DVD burner, and surprisingly spacious hard drive, this budget PC will grow with you. Just replace the onboard graphics with an advanced graphics card, should you find your calling as a digital-video editor or a 3D gamer. Movie buffs will want a larger display and a DVD-ROM drive--rather than the system's CD-ROM drive--paired with the DVD burner, but for general home use, the versatile eMachines T3085 is a strong budget buy that gives you room for future growth. The eMachines T3085, like the other three preconfigured desktops from eMachines, comes housed in an attractive and functional case, with the not-uncommon silver-and-black color scheme. The top-of-the-line T3085 offers two optical drive bays, a floppy drive, and a multiformat media-card reader. (Choose either of the lower two configurations, and you sacrifice the media-card reader.) The back panel is quite busy, with the usual legacy ports, plus four USB 2.0 ports, audio in/out and mike jacks, and a 10/100 LAN port. eMachines duplicates the microphone and earphone jacks up front under a sliding panel, while an additional USB 2.0 port comes courtesy of the media-card reader.

"="" --="">/sc/30826600-2-200-DT3.gif" width="200" height="150" border="0" alt="" />

"="" --="">/sc/30826600-2-200-DT2.gif" width="200" height="150" border="0" alt="" />

Although its minitower case doesn't allow for much drive expansion, the T3085 does provide three PCI slots with which to work, plus the all-important AGP slot, should you feel the need to add a graphics card at a later date.

For such a cheap PC, the eMachines T3085 comes surprisingly well outfitted. In turn, however, you don't get much room on the inside for expansion. Undo the two thumbscrews and slide off the side panel, and you'll find that both of the 5.25-inch drive bays are occupied, as are two of the four 3.5-inch bays. Neither of the free 3.5-inch bays is accessible from the front panel, but they are available should you want to add hard drives.
You have more options with the motherboard's expansion slots. The eMachines T3085 includes a PCI modem card, but if you're going the broadband route and using the integrated 10/100 Ethernet port, you can remove the modem card and have all three PCI slots at your disposal. One of the two memory sockets is unfilled, and after pushing aside the drive cables and wires, you can expand the memory up to 2GB. The jewel of this system, however, is the 8X AGP slot, which will let you replace the integrated graphics that shares system memory with a dedicated graphics card. This is an important option should you or someone in your home develop an interest in 3D gaming at some point down the road.
The black-and-silver color scheme extends to the keyboard and the scrollwheel optical mouse. The keyboard's Windows navigation shortcut keys and Windows Media Player controls make it more than just a pretty face.

"="" --="">/sc/30826600-2-200-DT1.gif" width="200" height="150" border="0" alt="" /> We were happy to see a multiformat DVD burner on such a low-cost system--too bad eMachines pairs it with a less-than-useful CD-ROM drive.

With a relatively powerful AMD Athlon XP processor, plus double the memory we'd expect at this price and a surprisingly roomy hard drive, the eMachines T3085 offers excellent fundamentals for such an inexpensive system. Its Athlon XP 3000+ processor, while not one of AMD's cutting-edge 64-bit CPUs, is more than competent for running both office and multimedia applications. And instead of the 256MB of memory we've come to expect from budget systems, the T3085 serves up 512MB of 333MHz memory, which goes a long way toward improving the system's performance and helps offset the 64MB of shared system memory that the onboard Nvidia graphics use. The 160GB Western Digital drive gives you plenty of room to house your collection of digital photos and MP3s. It has a 2MB buffer, however, instead of the larger 8MB variety favored by the digital-video-editing crowd. Then again, DV editing is one of the more intensive computing tasks and not a realistic goal for a cheap PC.
Of the four T-series eMachines models, the top-of-the-line T3085 is the only system that serves up a DVD burner--and a multiformat drive, at that. You can record to DVD-R and DVD+R discs at a speedy 4X clip, but you'll top out at a comparatively slow 16X speed when writing to CD-Rs. The other drive is a rather useless CD-ROM drive. A smarter choice would have been a DVD-ROM drive, which would let you make quick disc-to-disc copies of both CDs and DVDs.
If you plan to watch DVDs on the T3085, you'll want to choose a larger display than the E15T flat panel that eMachines bundled with our test system. At only 15 inches, the screen didn't do DVDs justice, but it did display sharp text and accurate colors, making it a good choice for basic use. (And if you purchase the monitor at retail, eMachines offers a $100 mail-in rebate.) Similarly, if movies are your thing, we'd suggest upgrading the bundled two-piece speaker set to a surround-sound set or at least a 2.1 set that gives you rich bass via a subwoofer. (Although the onboard audio looks like a two-channel setup, you can redirect line-in to the rear speakers and the mike to the center and subwoofer through Windows' Control Panel.)
The eMachines T3085 includes Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator Basic Edition and CyberLink PowerDVD to lend a hand in your CD-creation and DVD-playback endeavors. If it's work that you want, this system has you covered there as well, with the bundled Microsoft Works 7.0, Microsoft Money 2004, and Encarta Online. All in all, the eMachines T3085 comes with a strong software bundle, especially for its price. Application performance
The eMachines T3085 offers good bang for the buck. The system uses a 2.167GHz Athlon XP 3000+ processor, which gives performance that's on a par with that of a 2.6GHz Pentium 4. We were impressed by its SysMark 2004 score of 133, which trailed the 64-bit Athlon 64-based Systemax Ascent 64 system by a slim 6 percent and bested the Intel-based Dell Dimension 2400 by 3 percent. The eMachines T3085's performance would improve if it used 400MHz memory instead of the 333MHz variety, but out of the box, the eMachines T3085 is more than capable of running any office application.