Evesham Decimator

With a name like Decimator, there's no doubting Evesham's intention for its latest PC. It's clearly aimed at gamers, and is styled to match.

It's bigger than a normal tower case and has a brushed metal finish. The front of the case is a door that swings out to reveal two optical drives and an LCD panel that shows the temperature of the case, the speeds of the fans, and the date and time, which is largely redundant, especially if the PC is going to be stored out of sight under a desk.

Inside the case is a Pentium 4 570 3.8GHz processor, currently the fastest on the market, 1Gb of memory and an ATi Radeon X850XT graphics card, again one of the fastest available.

Storage is taken care of by two 250Gb hard disks. As you would expect, the Decimator's lab test scores were the fastest we have yet tested, and its games test scores were spectacular.

There are three spare 5.25in drive bays, a DVD-ROM drive and a dual-layer recordable DVD drive, which will read and write all formats bar DVD-RAM. Below these are a 10-in-1 memory card reader and a floppy disk drive.

There's a pair of USB sockets, a FireWire port, headphone and microphone sockets, while the back panel has four more USB ports, another FireWire port, surround-sound and digital sound outputs as well as all the usual ports.

The graphics card has a DVI monitor connection and an S-video output, and there's a modem on a separate expansion card.

Also included is a stunning Viewsonic 20in TFT monitor, a set of Creative Labs 7.1 speakers, Microsoft Works 8, Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD SE, Pinnacle Studio 9 SE, eTrust E-Z Antivirus, a two-year on-site warranty with a third year return-to-base.

But for all that, it's overkill for most users. It's one of the fastest and priciest PCs around, for sure, but the graphics performance will only be appreciated by gamers playing the latest releases.

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