Review: Evesham Axis Dominator 79GT PC

Evesham is never slow to take advantage of new technology and is the first to get a PC out to market that houses one of Nvidia’s new 7900-series graphics cards .

Instead of going for the high-end 7900GTX version, Evesham has opted for the Geforce 7900GT (read our review of the Nvidia Geforce 7900GT).

Although performance isn’t as good as the GTX or indeed ATI’s Radeon X1900 XTX, it offers better value for money and, unless you’re looking for top-notch gaming speeds, will be perfectly adequate for most.

The fast graphics are backed up by a decent dual-core AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ and 1GB of Ram (this is provided by a pair of 512MB PC3200 Dimms).

Aesthetically speaking, the Dominator 79GT isn’t particularly inspiring. Unlike Evesham’s Decimator chassis, used in the Evesham Axis FX 60 Fireball, the Dominator’s black panelling looks very mundane.

A small flap on the front of the case reveals two USB2 and a Firewire socket, along with audio connections.

Two Sony drives (one a dual-layer DVD writer, the other a DVD-Rom) take care of optical storage while a 7,200rpm Western Digital drive provides 250GB of hard disk space.

The supplied Viewsonic VA1912 is a reasonable 19in widescreen TFT with a native resolution of 1,440 x 900. A contrast ratio of 500:1 and 8ms response time are respectable while stereo speakers are conveniently built into the chassis.

Although Windows Media Center Edition is shipped as the operating system, there’s no TV tuner to take full advantage of it. Of course, you’ve always got the opportunity to add an internal or external tuner at a later date.

As expected, the Dominator 79GT flew through our Sysmark 2004 SE benchmark and achieved a score of 239. Meanwhile, the Geforce 7900GT graphics card helped 3Dmark05 to 8,089 at the standard resolution of 1,024 x 768, which beats previous PCs we’ve seen with Nvidia’s 7800GTX.

Audio is taken care of by Creative’s I-Trigue 3220 2.1 speakers from Creative. Available for around £40 online, these won’t blow you away, but will suffice for general PC use.

Should the system take a turn for the worse, Evesham provides a decent three-year on-site warranty as standard to fix any problems. Telephone assistance is also provided during office hours.

With the Dominator 79GT, Evesham has managed to include some of the latest technology while keeping the price down. It couldn’t quite squeeze it under the all-important £1,000 mark, but it’s still a good value system.

View full performance results of Evesham Axis Dominator 79GT review
Compare results of Evesham Axis Dominator 79GT to all PCs reviewed