My biggest beef with Dell and eMachines is the small form factor models. The Intel video cards embedded in the Intel motherboards fry and take the motherboard with it way to often. We have a few customers that insist on buying Dells and buying these small form factor Optiplexes. They just never listen. We resell HP Business Line with the old Compaq boards and have never had any problems like this.
I’ve dealt with this problem also, optiplex 270 sff is notorious for this problem, trying to buy even a 64mb half size agp or pci vidcard costs over $110 to fix, it usually is cheaper(if man hours isn’t included) to buy a new cheap case move the entirity of components over, and buy and install a new standard size 128mb vidcard.