Review: eMachines ET1831-07 Desktop PC

PCWorld: Review – eMachines ET1831-07 Desktop PC

One of a bunch of desktop PCs that PCWorld recently reviewed, this one doesn’t top the charts, the reviewer says, but the price and the fact that it compromises little on performance or quality makes it a great bargain choice.

“It’s common knowledge that the lower the cost of a desktop system, the more likely it will be a machine that cuts corners to achieve that price. You don’t often find a system that performs as admirably as its price is low. The eMachines ET1831-07, a $390 (as of March 30, 2010) midsize-tower PC, is just such a desktop. It offers substantial speed, decent upgradability, and a hefty chunk of storage space for a price that’s nearly $200 less than that of competing budget PCs.

Even though the ET1831-07’s Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 CPU is more than a year old now, its 2.7GHz of processing power–coupled with the system’s 4GB of DDR2 memory–helps the ET1831-07’s performance. On our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, with a score of 101, it fell short of a number of budget PCs on our charts–but all of those systems cost far more than the ET1831-07. The closest competition to the ET1831-07, the Gateway SX2840-01, delivered only a 17 percent performance boost for a 44 percent increase in cost.”