April 12, 2009 7:28 am GMT
eMachines d620 – A review and deja vu
by Gary IllyesWe have tested and reviewed a half a dozen eMachines notebooks. Reviewing the eMD620 by eMachines was much like a deja vu: it is exactly the same as the eMachines e620 from the inside, but looks a bit differently from the outside.
eMachines d620
From outside, the d620 is quite pretty. Even though it has black plastic case which usually is not pleasing for the eye, somehow eMachines manages with rounded case corners and simplistic design to create notebooks which looks good. The combination of the aluminum with the black plastic confers the d620 quite powerful look.
A small difference between the e620 and d620 is that while eMachines added an integrated webcam to the e620, the d620 misses one.
There are 8 ports in total on the d620:
- A VGA out, which enables the d620 user to connect a secondary monitor or a projector,
- an ethernet port,
- a microphone and a line-out jack,
- 3 USB 2.0 ports,
- and finally, the AC adapter connector
The DVD-RW is situated on the left side of the d620 and is capable to read/write CDs and DVDs, including Double layer.
Opening the lid reveals a 14.1″ WXGA high-brightness TFT LCD capable of a 1280×800 resolution. 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 only two buttons below the touchpad which works similarly to a 2-button mouse’s. If you’re used with a 3-button mouse, you will miss badly the 3rd button.
Inside the notebook ticks an AMD Athlon built with 64-bit architecture and ticking at 1.6 GHz under full load. The secondary cache is only 1 Meg and the processor bus is capable of an 800MHz transfer rate.
The motherboard chipset is an AMD RS690MC, the graphics card, of course is an ATI Radeon X1200 Graphics, with shared memory of up to 1919 Megs. Note that since you can’t place more than 2GB of RAM in the notebook, the almost 2Gigs of Video RAM is artificial, you will not be able to manage to set the VRAM size that high ever.
The d620 comes shipped with 1Gig of DDR2 RAM, expandable to 2 gigs.
Playing games on the d620 is definitely not fun. Even The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind lagged, Oblivion and F.E.A.R we couldn’t even start to play. Watching HD movies is impossible on this notebook as neither the RAM, the processor and the size of the VRAM is enough.
For office jobs and navigating on the internet however the d620 is quite good.
The base price of the d620 is $430 Canadian Dollars which at the moment of this post is exactly $350 USD. The notebook when runs on batteries can remain up and running for 2, 2,5 hours in average which is an excellent ratio, compared to the price.
Is it worth the price? I it is only if you will never want to watch high-definition movies and play games on your notebook.
Dougal on Sun, 12th Apr 2009 9:48 pm
Thanks for the review Gary. Very worthwhile and just as suspected as compared with the e620 you reviewed earlier. It has prompted my wife to buy the machine with the 2Gb RAM spec as offered by TESCO here in Scotland for just 20 of our bucks on top of the base price. She will use it mainly for office tasks and Internet browsing so, we will be happy.
Cheers again for the very helpful review and keep up the great work of reviewing products like this for us mere mortals.
Hugo on Sat, 16th May 2009 4:26 pm
Thanks for the review Gary
However, i have a few questions, if you say that the D620 is the same as the E620, why is that the D620 is not good for some gaming experience ?
I ask that because here in Portugal the D620 comes with 4096MG RAM, wich basically makes it the same as the E620 correcto ? so playing some World of Warcraft would be no problem right ?
All this questions is because the E620 was sold for a very very sort while here in Portugal, my mother bought one for herself, and now my girlfriend wants to buy the D620 (in a 2 month time the E620 is not in stores anymore) and she wants to give it a try at World of warcraft, and while i was looking for a diference in the two models, i cant find none what so ever, since the d620 here, comes with 4gb ram.
Hope i can get some feed back from you
Thanks
Best Regards
Gary Illyes on Sat, 16th May 2009 4:41 pm
Hi Hugo,
Both the D620 and E620 comes in different models. Both have versions which comes with more RAM or more disk space. The D620 we got is very similar to the E620, that’s all.
The problem generally is the Intel video board, not the amount of RAM. If you set the video board to have more vRAM, that will be deducted from the system RAM, thus the overall performance of the notebook decreases.
Playing World of Warcraft? Probably you will be able, but please compare the game’s requirements with the notebook’s specification before you buy anything.
andrew on Mon, 27th Jul 2009 5:02 am
i was gifted the D620 for X-Mas.i think my grandparents hate me X.X .. the fan ALWAYS overheats,and i have the laptop over a wooden desk all the time.so overheating shouldent be a problem. Next the CPU usage sucks! it runs at 100% just by running MSN.and i only have the windows vista processes running (48).The laptop does work for MMORPG games but it is so slow that there is no point in trying. next time,im going with acer or a company that can make a laptop with a WORKING fan.
Hugo on Tue, 28th Jul 2009 2:18 pm
Hey andrew
About the CPU usage, i would suggest trying to install windows xo instead of vista, i have one E620 with the same specs has the D620 and true enough it would slow a little bit with vista, but then i switched it to XP and it works really nice.
And emachines are low cost notebooks from acer i think
Best Regards
Vadim Simonyan on Mon, 3rd Aug 2009 9:59 am
I bought this, to see what I could do with it. So here goes: Ive upgraded my cpu to 2.9 ghz, upgraded the ram to 4GB (!) cut the battery life slightly but that doesn;t really matter.
Cris on Tue, 6th Oct 2009 8:18 pm
I have the D620 and I’ve NEVER been more disappointed. Me and My sister both got on of December of last year.. Not even a year old and Mine has died on me twice. It heats up REALLY fast… close to burning when opening it. It is SUPER slow and it gets to the point where i can’t open more than one web page at a time. The wireless internet is ridiculous… At one point i had to wait 6 hours for it to work flawlessly. And even then, it was terribly slow. Thes has got to be the worse laptop i have ever purchased in my life.
jayr on Wed, 14th Oct 2009 12:06 am
i’ve had this d620 for almost a month and i’m very impress with it. works smoothly fast and the looks we’re very stylish. i will bring it to manhattan when i travel…very satisfied!
alaa saad on Wed, 14th Oct 2009 7:33 pm
iam ask i need donloud the driver for thes la
greybear on Wed, 3rd Feb 2010 10:13 pm
Not a bad laptop, but the customer service is truly horrendous. The lcd screen stopped working on mine after 10 months. I could not find a phone number anywhere to call an actual live person for tech support and had to result the their online chat. upon giving them the serial number the first thing I was told, was that it was out of warranty and I could pay to have it repaired. even though I had the receipt in front of me proving it still had 2 months left on the warranty. Dealing with the support drone on the other end of the chat was sheer torture. English must have been his third or fourth language. His language was so bad I swore I was taking the turing test, and it was failing. after trying to get some help he disconnected on me.
After that I turned to email in my next vain help to get them to acknowledge that the warranty was still valid. After 4 days, being denied 6 times and told off once, I managed to get through and was able to send them a scanned copy of the receipt. After that the said it was under warranty. Then they had me jump through many hoops and questions to see if they could find another way to invalidate me.
After they found no other way, they told me to courier it to them(since they don’t allow the use of the post office) at my expense, and sent me a 4 page list of very specific packaging instructions to follow or it wouldn’t be covered. I managed to comply with these too and now have to wait and see if they can find another way to screw me.
They really do have the worlds very worst repair service.
GB on Wed, 3rd Mar 2010 9:13 pm
Good laptop for the price, but the customer service is appalling. The build quality of these machines is also appalling. I have had to send mine in 3 times now to repair the same issue (to do with the power input jack – it just wobbled around and cut out lots). Each time, it has come back in roughly the same condition I sent it away in.
The customer service was abysmal, and I spent a long time talking to a machine rather than a person. I had to call back twice each time, as i was not given the information of their strange courier system, even when I asked. It was also quite difficult to hear what the spokesperson was saying, as the call was to India, and on top of that, there was a rubbish phone, making it very difficult to understand.
I would definitely go for something higher in price, to save loads of hassle with crap customer service WHEN it breaks. It will, i promise.