Acer eMachines e620: Cheap is not bad

Where I live, when you buy something cheap almost always means that you get something which is not good. The eMachines series of Acer seems to fight against this rule: they are cheap, but extremely reliable and their performance is outstanding in their class.

I got this time an Acer eMachines e620 which I could test for a whole weekend and arrived to the conclusion, based on my previous reviews of the e510 and e520, that this notebook is one of the best notebooks I tested in eMachines bargain notebook category.
As always the tests I made a real-life tests, not benchmarks. My opinion about benchmarks is that they good for memory, processors and hard disks, but how a whole system performs can’t really be measured with benchmarking software but with real-life, real production-software tests.

Acer eMachines e620: Visually pleasing

Acer eMachines e620

Even though the notebook’s case is plastic, it looks beautiful. The black plastic is mixed with a thin white plastic stripe which confers the notebook a specific personality. The finish of the e620 is high quality and the silver/aluminum finish of the inscriptions only increases the notebook’s beauty.
The 15.4″ WXGA high-brightness LCD has an extremely wide view-angle, the output is easy to read even in very bright environment. The notebook has dual-output support, thus it can be used for presentations by linking a projector to it while watching what you do on its own display.
The arrangement of the buttons is very well thought. The keyboard is standard 88\89 keys input device, the numeric keypad can be accessed by simultaneously pressing the “Fn” key and the number’s specific key. The touchpad worked perfectly even when it was dusty or even when it was wet. The eMachines e620 has three buttons below the touchpad which works similarly to a 3-button mouse’s.

The eMachines e620 and multimeda processing

The eM-e620 came with Windows Vista Home Premium already installed. Since Vista uses more memory than XP the common mind would have dictate that a HD video will lag during play. I was wrong.
The first test was watching a HD movie (720p). Miraculously, the playback was flawless.
Playing was also very pleasing. I installed this time 3 games, World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and F.E.A.R.
All the above were played without any issue, the transactions were flawless even when the details were set to high, less F.E.A.R. which was a slightly slow in high detail mode, but still playable.

Even though it sounds weird that the above games works well on the e620, the unexpected performance is understandable when you know the notebook’s specifications.

eMachines e620: Technical Specifications

• Processor: AMD AM2 Athlon 2650e processor, working at 1.6GHz under full load, 800MHz front side bus and 512KB L2 cache
• RAM: 2GB DDRII RAM working at 667MHz, upgradeable up to 4GB
• Graphics: ATI Radeon™ Xpress 1200

eM-e620 and Operating systems

As I said before, the eMachines e620 came with Windows Vista Home Premium already installed. As always with AHCI enabled hard drives, you have to switch to IDE mode before you can install XP. After you switched to IDE mode, installing any OS is straight forward. In eMachines e620’s case XP will find a very limited number of drivers for the hardware, but after connecting to the internet, I could find every missing driver on the eMachines support website or on the hardware manufacturer’s website.

Last thoughts on eMachine e620

The notebook comes shipped with a 44.4 W 4400 mAh 6-cell Li-ion battery which under full load lasts less than an hour. If you leave in peace the notebook, the batteries will last for about 2 and a half hours.
The notebook’s price is $450 + VAT where I live, that makes its price quite acceptable. Other than the short battery life I can’t complain about anything. If you are not a traveler type person, probably this notebook will fit your needs.

Acer eMachines drivers (XP & Vista)

Update: If you’re sick of searching for XP drivers for your eMachines notebook, the official support website of eMachines provided them here: http://support.emachines.com/em/driver/index.html. If you click the link, you will find both Vista and XP drivers, and additionally the users’ manual in PDF format for your eMachines notebook and desktop PC.