Emachines M6809 -- Personal review

M

Matt126

Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2001
Messages
812
I received my laptop Monday morning from JandR.com.

The packing was pretty good, no room to move around.
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In the box I found the laptop and a box of accessories.
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Contents: manuals, phone cable(yay), AC adapter, and the lovely battery.

The real goods:
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This laptop is not a small piece as you can see, and it's not the lightest laptop in the world. I can attest that it fully makes up for it in performance however. I am damn impressed with the speed of this machine. I've now had the laptop for over 24 hours, and I have a dualboot with Windows XP and 64bit Gentoo Linux. The linux support is decent. Most things work with the exception of the wireless LAN under linux.

The wireless range in windows is decent, I don't have anything to compare it to however. I'm using a netgear WAP and at the other end of the house I get 36mbps connection speed.

The only game I have installed so far, as I have been busy with linux, is counter-strike. I must say that for the short time that I did play, it ran flawlessly. I got 100fps constant. I did try the widescreen mode but I did not like it so I turned it off.

All of the drivers and restoration garbage is on ONE dvd instead of multiple cd's. I thought this was a really good idea. The DVD includes all the software you need, as well as drivers for every device.

I've never really reviewed anything before so if theres anything I missed, or you want to know, feel free to ask. I know a lot of people are interested in this power-house of a laptop.


-Matt
 
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that. I did unfortunately get a 4200rpm Hitachi/IBM. I was hoping for a 5400, but I was not expecting it. It's unfortunate, but it wouldn't have changed my decision on getting this laptop.
 
I guess you probably dont have much to compare it to, but do you notice any sluggishness with the HD?

also, when you get a chance to run it on battery (under fairly light use, not much gaming just wireless/internet etc.) let us know what kind of battery life youre getting.

about the weight, is it bearable, or do you feel like you would like to leave it on the desk most of the time?

thanks in advance, sorry about bombarding you with these questions.....anyway congrats!
 
Thanks for the little review ! It's cool that emachines burned the contents of all the 3 cds into one single dvd... much much better and hey, waaaay cooler. How much did you pay for it in the end including tax ? How long did it take to arrive ? Thanks again, wow I envy you !
 
Originally posted by benz
I guess you probably dont have much to compare it to, but do you notice any sluggishness with the HD?

also, when you get a chance to run it on battery (under fairly light use, not much gaming just wireless/internet etc.) let us know what kind of battery life youre getting.

about the weight, is it bearable, or do you feel like you would like to leave it on the desk most of the time?

thanks in advance, sorry about bombarding you with these questions.....anyway congrats!
Click to expand...

It's really not too bad in my opinion. If I were switching from a 7200rpm 60gb, I might have a different opinion. Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied.

People are all reporting the same battery life on these things. If you tweak it out you're going to get about 3 hours of life. I'd say you could get a solid 2 hours using wireless and a fair amount of other activity.

As for the weight, again, don't expect it to be light. It is plently portable. I wouldn't mind carrying it around in a bag, in fact, I plan to. I bought this to be a desktop replacement so I knew what I was getting into.

The laptop is 1650 - 100$ in rebate.

So 1500. I didn't pay tax because I ordered it online.
 
Ok just answer me this last question : How long did it take from the moment you ordered it online to the moment it got to your door...
 
I ordered it Thursday morning, it shipped Friday afternoon, I received it Monday morning. I live in NJ and the place is located in NY. It only took one business day even with ground shipping. The last time I checked they sold out of this notebook, but they could have gotten more in stock.
 
Hey all! Just figure I'd cut n paste a post I made at earlier at AMD's forum http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showforum=4

Okay I'm back to report on some Emachines M6809 information.

First off, I got my hands on one and I got it at neighboring Best Buy store, because the store I work at seems to get their stuff later, for whatever reasons. Each store that I looked in the immediate Southern California region had or was going to have anywhere from 3-6 units sometime from NOW to sometime in the next week or so.
Unit is retailing right now at $1649.99 with $100 emachines/mfr Mail-In Rebate.

Okay so naturally first question on all our minds are- "Is anything different?" Well yes, but very very minor. Okay let me break it down for you.

The chassis is the same, BUT now they added two rubber nubs (kinda like the ones on and around the border of the LCD screen)- One on each side of the wrist rest portion of the body. This was added I believe to help with when people slam down the LCD/close the Lid to prevent the LCD from damaged.

Hard drive is 80gigs 4200rpm. So larger but slower (than if you choose to upgrade to a 7200rpm).

DVD-Burner is DIFFERENT from the M6807's! the M6809 comes with a (Liteon) Slimtype DVDRW SDW-431S [Firmware:MBS2] - which I found out can be flashed to make it DVD playback Region Free. Oh yeah, FORGOT the most important part... how is the Liteon different from the Pioneer one that comes with the 6807? Speed. Pioneer has a 16x CDR read/write speed. The Liteon has a 24x CDR read/write speed. Every other speed spec unchanged... ie. DVD+RW are both 2.4x and DVD-RW both 2.0x etc etc.

CPU (moment you've been waiting for) - AMD MOBILE Athlon 64 3200+ - Model no: AMN3200BIX5AR - (The "N" designates true Mobile. And "A" would designate the DTR/psuedo-"Mobile")

Okay ran Out of the Box benchmarks (but used my 60gig 7200rpm drive instead of the 80gig, cuz I didn't want to waste a whole day installing updates/drivers/test tools/Clockgen/3DMarks/etc just to benchmark). So stock 512MB RAM, stock CPU speed-no overclock, ATI 9600 at stock core/mem.

Stock 3DMark2001 Score(with CPU at Always on 2004MHz) - 9067
Stock 3DMark2003 Score(with CPU at Always on 2004MHz) - 2451

So I kept playing with attempts at overclocking this CPU and found it to be MOST stable at CPU=2205.89MHz HTT/FSB= 220.59MHz Mem = 183.82MHz using ClockGen05 [FID=10.0 VID=14.0]

Re-ran the benchmarks and got -

OC 3DMark2001 Score - 9994 *
OC 3DMark2003 Score - 2713 *

*This is with CPU at 2205.89MHz - ATI Radeon boosted to core=351/mem=202.5 using Radlinker (higher ATI OC's met with reboots/total display aberrations) running on Omega Drivers 2.5.36a - still with stock Samsung 512MB DDR 333's

Okay that's the end of that. I wasn't as impressed with the results of the CPU, for whatever reasons. I don't know if the stock RAM had much to do with it.

I don't think i'll be running any more tests, since I pulled the 3200+ and stuck in my 3400+ DTR and threw in my Crucial 512's. But I figure other people who end up picking up the M6809's can at least have some kind of starting point and can resume where I left off. I wanted to run WinStone tests, but don't have access to the software.

Well hope all of this was informative. Just post questions, remarks and replies as usual.
 
Better place for my post from other thread:

Received mine from J&R on 12 Apr; quite pleased with it. I am disappointed that the 80gb HD is the 4200rpm Hitachi, I had hoped at least for the 5400 version... First thing I did was slap a Centon 512MB PC2700 SODIMM in it (CUSA, $119.00-$20 MIR). Memory works like a champ. I'll buy another and try the internal RAM swap soon. The driver and software disk comes on a single DVD instead of 3 CDs. As I was configuring it I tried the battery out after frst charge; got 3:15 using the wireless and about 75% screen brightness...very impressive! Should just get better as battery breaks in, hopefully.

Also on battery the CPU runs at 800 MHz, but would jump to 1.6 GHz as I loaded it with programs (non-scientific, but according to WCPUID). On AC it stayed at 2.0 GHz. Think the BIOS was updated from m6807/9?

Anybody find a decent compatible AC adapter for cheaper than the stock replacement ($70)?

Any other questions I can answer?
 
Sorry to ask in your thread, but I didn't think a new one is appropriate - for this laptop (and other emachines), what is this widescreen mode? Does it still play games correctly, and do they look ok? Just curious since you mentioned it and the stickied FAQ did too
 
I was the lucky soul who had the pleasure of installing gentoo for Mattyboy. All I can say is that I was VERY impressed with the performance of the hardware (been waiting for a machine like this since opterons announcement) as it destroyed any code I threw at it. For any gentoo users it was a stage3 install so prolly had some room for optimization to the compilers and base system. We were able to get X running but only with VESA as ati has not supplied working 64 bit drivers yet. Hope Matt gets his fireplug issue resolved. =\

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=755958

EDIT: Props to the gentoo staff for creating the best linux metadistro in the world.
 
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