Just picked up an eMachines M6805 from BestBuy and I'm loving it so far. I needed something to use as a desktop replacement without breaking the bank, and after spending quite a bit of time in these forums and reading various reviews, it seemed like the best choice.
I did, however, get stuck with the slower hard drive (4200) and was thinking of popping a 7200 in there instead. Was just wondering if anyone else has done this yet and whether or not it made enough of a difference to warrant the $200 price tag? As I understand some 7200's actually run a bit quieter and don't suck up as much battery life, which is cool, and I assume the 8MB cache helps out, but I hate to chunk more money into it if I'm not going to notice that much of a difference.
I'd also like to get 1GB of RAM instead of the default 512MB. Does anybody have instructions on how to replace the DIMM beneath the keyboard? I'm a little worried I might break something, but I'd rather not send it back to eMachines for such a simple upgrade.
Thanks for any tips you might have.
And if anybody is still trying to figure out what machine to pick up, I'd highly recommend the eMachines M6805. I was apprehensive at first, as I'm sure most people are when they see the name eMachines, but the latop has a very sturdy feel, top notch components, the screen is nice, and while I've only played Midnight Club II on it, it looked great and ran as fast as it does on my desktop. I'm able to run Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Outlook, Trillian, etc at the same time without any hangups. Keyboard is not as firm as I'd like, but it gets the job done. I don't see how you could do better for $1300.
glad youre enjoying your new machine as much as i am!
yes it is a sort of gamble on whether you get 4200 or 5400rpm HDD, I too got a 4200 after removing it from the system... (heh i was amazed at the size of the HDD... the last laptop HDD i ever looked at was from a laptop thats like 5 years old, the drive looks the size of standard ide..
anyway, a lot of people have seen great performance jumps after swapping out the hard drive, and its like the last qualm they have with the system and are TOTALLY satisfied after the swap. If it bothers you that the drive is slow, you want to benchmark better, you want windows to boot faster, and you want more snappiness, then go for it if you can justify adding more money onto the system cost.
there ARE performance gains to be had.
im trying to find a site where a guy dismantled his m6805 and took lots of pics, but i cant seem to locate it.
it either got linked to off Anandtech or AMD forums. look around.
and you should start overclocking this badboy!
my video went from 297/202 up to 430/230 safely, no artifacts.
Awesome! Thanks for the great advice. I'm think I'm gonna pick up a new hard drive and hold off on the RAM. I've also started looking into the overclocking stuff, but I'm a little worried about messing up my new machine
there ya go, thats the page i was thinking of... heh howd you find it?
Yea, the first few days I had it, i immediately jumped into overclocking it and actually corrupted my OS twice, and had to restore the HDD using the emachines cds...
Its because the FSB was too high for the PC2700 to handle, so it corrupted windows.. now ive learned from that mistake.
if you are careful of what youre doing and are willing to take a risk (might wanna ghost your HDD first), the performance gains are great. I can help you in your OCing ventures for sure though!
Good choice on the HDD over RAM..theres more performance to be had I think in changing the drive out. Plus, I would wait a bit and see if emachines will release a bios which supports the use of PC3200...THEN upgrade
I found the link off a forum somewhere, not sure. I've spent quite a bit of time on these things since I got my laptop... and even more time before I got it
I just grabbed Ghost, so once I get my external enclosure and new hard drive next week I'm gonna give the OC'ing a try. I was gonna try to avoid using the eMachines restore disks on the new drive and install XP Pro from scratch. Not a big fan of all the extra stuff they toss on there, and I assume the drivers can all be downloaded. I guess I'll find out.
I installed the Omega drivers to mess with video, but I'm not sure which version of ClockGen to download. The MB is using a Via chipset is it not? The only generic one I see for the 64-bit chip is for nVidia chipsets.
Always slightly confused when it comes to new stuff :P
Yes, I agree with not wanting to use the emachines restores...
I like my machine a certain way, and i hate to lose all my stuff... so it was a big pain when i had to use the disks TWICE after bad overclocks. Id hate to fvck things up again after these 2+ weeks, ALL my progress with this computer. So Ghost would be wise for me as well... though Id have to burn cds to do it... that would be like 40+ discs!
If you want I could somehow send you all the drivers if you need, but im sure they are available somewhere...
for Clockgen, get the Athlon64 version that ends in '03'... the 05 and whatever else there is just dont work properly...
Are you using the Omega drivers to overclock video? Might look into ATITools... it automates the overclock testing process, I was pretty impressed with that application.
glad to help ya buddy, good to know im of help to someone
drop a line when you need something!
Downloaded ClockGen and ATITools (thx for the specifics) and started messin' with them, but I get my new drive on Monday so I'm gonna hold off till I know what I have now is safely backed up. I've already burned the 'drivers' dir to a CD should I need them. I assume most of the generic notebook stuff is part of XP since they included everything, so as long as I can boot up I can download the latest drivers after install.
Anyway I'm really tempted to mess around with the OC'ing now, but I'm out of town w/o my restore discs so I'd hate to be down for the rest of the weekend if something goes wrong :P
Damnnnn, soooo tempting. Patience.
I'll let you know if everything goes ok on Monday. If something explodes, I'm coming to Georgia
Finally got my 7200 Hitachi ($217 from zipzoomfly.com) and it makes a huge difference (was using the 4200 drive before)! Anybody wanting to upgrade performance on their m6805/7, it's 200 bux well spent and extremely easy to setup and get rolling in no time. I bought a $20 external enclosure from newegg and stuck my old drive in there, so now I've got a handy external for 'backup' files n' whatnot.
Currently OC'ing at 2ghz/430/230 without issue.
It's all good... except for that dead pixel that showed up today :P
thats awesome to hear that the hard drive upgrade was worthwhile...though i cant really bring myself to spend $200+ on a 60GB HDD... I think I could stick with this crapass 4200..
Good overclock... see if you can push it to 2100 perhaps?
there are a few guys who have managed to do so...
Just make a Ghost of your HDD onto the external and youre ready to rawk!
sucks about the dead pixel... my display was blessed enough to be free of such problems
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