Digital Trends

eMachines T6212 May 31st, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

Setting up the T6212 will take you a little time. eMachines gives you an easy-to-use manual that walks you through the initial process of plugging in everything and following the step-by-step Windows XP setup. Once we were actually on our desktop, we were attacked by a ton of pop-up messages asking us to update our operating system and registering the preinstalled software; it was actually pretty frustrating, so we are going to give you our recommendations.

First of all, instantly delete the Norton Internet Security software. With Windows Service Pack 2 installed, you have all of the internet security features you really need. We were not even able to access the internet until we sat down and setup the Norton Internet Security software, a process that took about 15- 20 minutes in itself.

Secondly, delete the McAfee Anti-Spyware software form your system. Then go to the Spybot website or Lavasoft website and download their anti-spyware software. Spybot is free and should do the trick, but for added protection, we recommend you run Ad-Aware at the same time. It costs a little bit of money, but it's a great non-intrusive program.

Once we deleted the Norton and McAfee software, we got a chance to really sit down and use the system. The AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor and 512MB of memory really helped to speed up most applications we used. The hard drive is pretty loud and is clearly audible when it's being accessed. If you are like us, there is just something comforting about a quiet and speedy hard drive, and the Western Digital drive in this system had us on the edge of our seat, but it did not fail us throughout our testing.

The ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics chip is pretty impressive for an integrated solution. It does use shared memory with the systems main RAM, so it certainly will not perform as well as a standalone video card, but we would take it over an integrated Intel graphics chip any day.

We decided to open up the system to see just how upgradeable this system is and we were blown away by what we saw. There is an open PCI-Express graphics slot, two PCI slots, two memory slots, four SATA controllers and room to add an extra hard drive. eMachines doesn't really mention how upgradeable this system is, which is a shame because it would compel people to purchase the T6212 over similarly priced systems. All of the power and IDE cables were neatly zip tied and there was plenty of room for air flow. Now the power supply output is only 300-watts, so if you did decide to add a high-end graphics card to this system, you might have to put in a more powerful power supply, but based on what we have seen, the case should be able to accommodate it.

There is plenty of room for upgrading the T6212 system

In our benchmark testing, the T6212 was able to compete with our two other test systems on any test that did not include the graphics chip. This goes to show that the AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor and 512MB of DDR memory are the two best components in this system. From a gaming perspective, the T6212 just cannot compete. With the Radeon Xpress 200 graphics chip running at 1024x768 at maximum settings, our games were completely unplayable. And by today's standards, you should be able to play any games at 1024x768 with halfway decent effects turned on, the T6212 really runs best with medium settings; sort of a bummer really. We also tried running the Sysmark benchmark on this system, but the DVD drive would not read our test DVD correctly forcing us to forego the test altogether. For complete benchmarks, please click on the performance tab and link located above and below this review.