Evesham Evolution Bluebeast

The Evolution Bluebeast certainly lives up to its name when seen in the flesh. The PC features an aggressive looking front fascia of raised blue ridges against a black background. It's not an unappealing look, but is likely to be more attractive to the younger generation than to the old.

Down the left-hand panel you'll find a menacing looking air vent. Peak inside and you'll be greeted by a mini lightshow as Evesham has fitted a fan with flashing, multicoloured LEDs over the motherboard's chipset. The result, however, just looks like disco lights inside your PC.

It's pretty obvious that Evesham is trying to find a half-way house between a PC that will appeal to the average mum at home who wants to be able to use email, and one that has the touch of rebellion the teenage son will admire. We're not so sure it manages to pull off the feat, as it seems to us to fall rather uncomfortably between two stools.

While the outside design may be slightly problematic, inside things look a whole lot better. The side panel opens to reveal a spacious interior allowing plenty of airflow around the system's core. There's a green funnel attached to the air vent on the side panel to assist direct flow of heat from the Pentium 4 3GHz hyperthreading processor out of the system. You'll also be able to spot that the Bluebeast is built around an MSI i865PE motherboard. This has four slots for memory and these are divided into two colour-coded channels. Each channel is populated with a 256MB stick of PC3200 DDR Ram allowing the system to take advantage of the chipset's dual memory channel capability that speeds up Ram access.

Evesham has used the motherboard's onboard peripherals for both 10/100 Ethernet network and sound. The C-Media audio chip provides 5.1 decoding, but rather annoyingly Evesham hadn't punched out the moulded plastic stoppers covering the audio mini jacks at the front of our test machine, so there was no way we could plug in all the audio cables needed to the drive the system's Creative P580 Inspire 5.1 speaker set. It was easy for us to tell where they were and remove them, but this could prove baffling to someone who wasn't so computer literate. Also annoying was the fact that the company hasn't included a daughtercard to provide digital audio inputs and outputs.

On the plus side, because so many of the basics are dealt with by onboard components, it does mean there's plenty of room for expansion. In fact there are only two slots filled on the motherboard, one for the graphics card and another for the 56K modem, leaving four PCI slots free for adding extra goodies. In fact you may find yourself having to fit an extra card pretty quickly as there's no Firewire as standard.

Nevertheless in other areas, such as storage, the PC wasn't lacking. The 120GB Maxtor hard drive should be roomy enough for most people's needs and there's a multiformat Sony DVD writer. It can write to both the plus and minus varieties of recordable DVDs, so you don't have to worry about the DVD format wars.

Despite its imposing name, the Evolution Bluebeast wasn't a stunner in terms of performance but it didn't embarrass itself either. While it was no slouch when it came to Sysmark with a score of 297, we found that, despite the presence of an ATI Radeon 9600, it lacked a bit in the 3D department, notching up a lacklustre score of 9,314 in 3Dmark and 77.69 frames per second in our Unreal tests.

Overall, the Evesham Bluebeast is an interesting machine with its attempt to be a half-way house between a showy PC for the kids and a more sober offering for mum and dad. However, despite its budget price and relatively speedy processor we just didn't feel it was a totally balanced package.

Contact: Evesham 0870 160 9500
www.evesham.com

Specifications:

• Window XP Home
• Pentium 4 3GHz HT
• 2 x 256MB DDR Dimm PC3200
• MSI i865PE ATX
• 120GB hard disk
• Sony DW-U14A DVD Multi (OEM) (black)
• 4x DVD writer (+ and - formats)
• 16x DVD
• ATI Radeon 9600 128MB DDR
• Viewsonic VP171S 17in TFT
• Creative P580 Inspire 5.1
• 10/100 Ethernet
• C-Media Soundblaster compatible 6-channel audio
• Warranty: 2yr on-site, 1yr RTB