eMachines e720 – Your everyday friend you can rely on

Looking for a bargain notebook which will do almost any job you assign to it? The eMachines e720 might be the portable PC you are looking for!

There are notebooks which worth the price and there are ones which they do not, even in the bargain category. The eMachine e720 is definitely worth its price. It is manufactured by Acer, seemingly they have purchased the eMachines firm to be able to offer even cheaper notebooks.

From the outside the e720 looks just like any other cheaper eMachines notebook: black plastic casing with an “e” on the lid. Somehow, even if it’s the simplest design possible, it still looks good.
The keyboard is neither interesting. It is a 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 when it was wet. The eMachines e720 has only two buttons below the touchpad, if you’re used to a 3 button mouse, this can be quite annoying.

As always, we tried to run 3 games on the notebook. This time we chose to install on the e720 The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and F.E.A.R.
Morrowind runs excellently on the e720, without a lag or long “loading” screens. The other two games however were much less than enjoyable. Inside a building or a cavern in Oblivion the game runs quite smoothly, but as soon as we arrived “outside in the nature”, the game’s enjoyability has decreased severely.
F.E.A.R. was very enjoyable, but after we have set the detail levels to high, it started to lag a bit. It was still playable, though.

The gaming performance of the eMachines e720 is not the best, but this isn’t a miracle after you learn the specs of the e720.
The processor is an Intel Pentium for Mobile T3400. This processor is dual-core, has 1MB of second level cache and under maximum load it ticks at 2.16 MHz. It is built with 64 bit architecture, as always you will have to have operating system and drivers which supports the 64 bit architecture.
It has 2Gigs of DDR2 RAM with a 800MHz bus speed installed, which is also the e720′ maximum RAM capacity. The video card is an Intel GMS 4500M with 64MB of dedicated video memory and up to 1695MB of shared system memory; it has native DirectX 10 support and has one external VGA port.

Watching HD movies was a pleasure. We tried the video performance both with 720p and 1080i/1080p movies and both were played with a single lag.
However video editing was a nightmare. We tried with Adobe Premiere to mix 3, 5 minute videos and one stereo audio file, but after we have added the second video to the software, that crashed. The eMachines e720 is simply doesn’t has enough horse power to handle video editing apps.

The lithium-ion battery of the eMachines e720 has 6 cells which confers the notebook quite high uptime when running on batteries.
In Windows 7, in Power Saver mode the battery of the e720 lasted 2.2 hours in average, in High Performance mode this was decreased to approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes in average.
Windows XP, with its less advanced power management system managed to keep the notebook one and a half hours up.

The e720 we have tested is available only in the U.S. market for exactly $500 plus VAT, thus it is categorized as bargain notebook.
Our opinion is that, just like the other eMachines notebooks worth the price. If you are not a gamer and you don’t edit videos, the eMachines e720 will do whatever daily job you assign to it. It is extremely good for programming, navigating on the internet or just watching movies even in HD quality.
The only negative side of the notebook is that it has only two USB ports.