emachines has been competetive for a long, long time. The only things that were ever in question were the original power supplies on thos early towers, and the trigem motherboards on some units. I had an emachine emonster 700k w750 athlon that had the irongate 754 amd chipset, and the motheboard was msi. It was one of the very best machines out at that time and had some of the best reviews out there at that time. I had that little machine outperforming the Dell P2 and P3's easily. The only problem would have been the 120W power supply (I used a dremel to cut more space and aded and allied 250w). Trigem motherboards aside emachines were always good. They have used DFI, MSI, and FIC. Recently the FIC AU31 matx NF2. They also had one of the very first A64 platforms (as a tower) to come out as an OEM. It used a mATX VIA MSI KM800 with A643000-3200. They stopped producing it though for some reason but it performed well.
