Evesham Athlon XP 2000+ PC

AMD has had things its own way for a good long while now, with every recent revision of the Athlon beating every competing version of the Pentium 4 on both price and performance.

But with the new Intel Northwood processors, AMD has finally been caught on its back foot.

At the heart of the 2K TI5 is an Athlon XP 2000+ processor, running not at 2GHz as the name might suggest, but at 1.68GHz - the 2000 refers to AMD's notional speed rating.

The Axis 2K is broadly similar to the Axis P4, but there are differences aside from the processors. Most obvious is the single hard drive rather than the dual Raid array of the P4 system.

If you were thinking of downloading the entire internet, the 100Gb Western Digital with 2Mb buffer fitted to the 2K won't be quite big enough, but there's not much else it won't cope with. It's a little slower than a pair of striped drives, but that won't affect you greatly unless you're editing enormous images in Photoshop or doing things that make heavy use of Windows' swapfile.

Memory

You get half a gigabyte of Ram in the form of two 256Mb DDR SD-Ram sticks, with a single slot left free on the Asus A7V266-E. The difference between 256 and 512Mb is easily noticeable with Windows XP once you start using applications seriously, and with DDR prices currently on the rise, getting this amount now is a good move.

Slots and sound

As with the P4 system, the 2K has a SoundBlaster Audigy sound card, complete with a single FireWire connector and Midi/game port connector attached to a separate PCI blanking plate, rendering one of the three free PCI slots unusable.

Inside

The inside of the case is up to Evesham's usual standards: a clean uncluttered interior. There are two front-panel drives free: one 5.25in and one 3.5in, plus a bay in the internal drive cage for an extra hard disk. At the front of the case you get two USB ports, with a further pair on the back panel.

Peripherals

Peripheral devices include a 24-speed Mirai CD-RW drive, plus a Samsung 16-speed DVD-Rom. Output from the Audigy is handled by a set of Creative DTT 2200s, a good set of 5.1 speakers.

The Microsoft keyboard has a much more positive feel than models the company has produced in the past, and, coupled with the Logitech optical mouse, you've got as good an input combination as you could wish for.

The 19in LG monitor 915FT Plus is a lovely piece of design with its touch-sensitive controls. Picture quality from the Flatron tube is excellent at resolutions up to 1,280 x 1,024.

The Axis also has a Winfast Titanium 500 Geforce3 graphics card, replete with 64Mb of SD-Ram.

Software

The system comes with Windows XP Home Edition, and Evesham supplies Pinnacle Studio 7 to partner the FireWire port, plus Star Office 5.1, Nero 5.5 and Bigfix technical support software.

Test results

When it comes to the benchmarks, the 2K doesn't quite manage to top the 200 mark, coming in with an overall Sysmark 2001 score of 194. It's interesting to note that, although the overall score is slower than the two Northwood Pentium 4s also tested, the Office section of the test is roughly the same (196 for the Athlon as opposed to 197 and 192 for the Northwoods), whereas the P4s are considerably faster at multimedia content creation.

That said, the AMD processor beats the Pentium 4 on two of our other tests. Our 3D Studio Max scene rendered in 14 minutes seven seconds, while one per cent of our Seti@home work unit was completed in five minutes 22 seconds. 3D performance of this system is roughly on a par with the Intel PCs.

Conclusion

Now that the Northwood P4s are on the scene, we can't unconditionally recommend Athlons in the way we have been for the past year or so. But the revamped competition from Intel doesn't stop the 2K from being a very fast, well-specified PC.Contact
Evesham: 0870 160 9500 www.evesham.com