Digital Archaeology: eMachines T5088

eMachines were known for their bargain basement priced computers. Unfortunately, while they were certainly cheap for their time, you got what you paid for. The T5088 was their middle of the road model but there wasn't much in the way of price or features that separated the three desktop models they had on the market at the time. This model retailed for $450 which was $50 more than the lowest end model. For the extra $50 you got a slightly lower clocked but hyperthreaded Pentium 4 with a larger cache and a somewhat larger hard drive. The stock hardware includes:

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 HT 641 @ 3.2 GHz (Cedar Mill)
• RAM: 512MB PC2-4200
• Video: Intel 82945G Express

Check the output of CPU-Z or HWiNFO for more hardware details.

Mine has been upgraded to have 1.5 GB of RAM and even that really seems insufficient for the Vista Home Basic OS that it came with. I can't imagine running with only 512MB. Otherwise, my T5088 seems to be completely stock with even the original hard drive and recovery partition.

There do seem to be some upgrade options. While officially there is not much of an upgrade path, I found at least one claim that flashing to the latest stock Intel BIOS for this board (D945GCCR) will allow the use of up to a Core 2 Duo E4600. Moving from a P4 to a Core 2 Duo and having two real cores to work with is a pretty substantial upgrade. This will also allow installing up to 4GB of RAM (2GB is the official limit).

You can also install a video card as there is a PCI Express x16 slot. However, you should really upgrade the power supply first which is a 300 watt model. A standard power supply and motherboard layout seems to have been used with this model which makes upgrading easy in that regard. That isn't always the case with OEM systems.

I don't know how many eMachines T5088s are left in the world but there will probably be one fewer when I am done here. Although it is in nearly mint condition and even includes the original hard drive with an original OS restore, it just isn't that interesting of a machine. For Pentium 4 based machines I would be far more interested in something Socket 423 or 478 based. Socket 775 is really a Core 2 Duo socket with the Pentium 4 being made for it to have a budget processor for that platform. In the past I might have upgraded it just to see how far I could push it but I have better Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo machines and I've accumulated too many overall and am trying to reduce a little. This one is a prime candidate for downsizing my collection.

For the moment, I am typing this on that machine as it processes various tasks for BOINC. It can still crunch tasks at least for Einstein@home, World Community Grid, Asteroids@home, and possibly MilkyWay@home and others. You can also check out how it is doing over all at FreeDC.

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