Evesham Quest Explorer

Evesham's Quest Explorer is one of the first notebooks to use AMD's new Turion 64 CPU, a mobile version of the Athlon 64 designed to help regain ground lost to Intel's Pentium M.

While the Quest Explorer represents a shift in AMD's focus towards thin and light notebooks, Evesham's choice of chassis places it somewhere between an ultra-portable and a desktop replacement.

It's more manageable than most current AMD-based notebooks, but its 2.9kg frame isn't suited to being carried for long periods of time.

We also had mixed feelings about the specification. The system has enough grunt to perform typical tasks expected of an ultra-portable, but its 1.8GHz Turion isn't as potent as an equivalent Intel offering.

We were more impressed by the 512MB of Ram, although 32MB of this is assigned to an onboard graphics adapter. As a note, the latter won't perform well with modern 3D games and failed to run 3Dmark 05.

Evesham has equipped the Quest Explorer with an 80GB hard drive, a large amount for this type of notebook, and, should you run out of room, the machine's dual-layer DVD drive comes in handy for backups.

We were most impressed by this notebook's battery life: it lasted two hours, 41 minutes.

The Quest Explorer doesn't quite live up to the standard set by equivalent Pentium-based notebooks but, if you sacrifice a little performance to save money, it's excellent value.