evesham.com Axis 1800 Plus Ti5

The Axis 1800 Plus Ti5 comes packed with all the latest technical innovations. It includes the most recent AMD processor, nVidia's newest GeForce incarnation, and Creative's 24bit sound card.

The AMD chip is the long-awaited modification of its Athlon processor, Athlon XP, codenamed Palomino. It comes in four forms: 1800 (reviewed here), 1700, 1600 and 1500. Confusingly, the applied numeric does not indicate the chip's clock speed in megahertz. It is an approximate equivalent that an old Athlon Thunderbird processor would need to reach in order to achieve a similar performance. So, an 1800 Athlon XP should be similar to a 1.8GHz Thunderbird (if one existed). Its actual clock speed is 1.53GHz.

AMD's name for the extra technology in Athlon XP is Quantispeed. Part of this is the introduction of a hardware data pre-fetch, as well as better Translation Look Aside Buffer prediction. It also has a thermal diode, intended to work with compliant motherboards to slow the CPU down if it overheats.

AMD has achieved a 20 per cent decrease in power consumption, as the profile of the transistor has been reduced. That said, AMD is sticking to 0.18micron transistor technology for now.

With 512MB of DDR SDRAM filling up both DIMM slots on the Gigabyte GA-7DX motherboard, and Windows XP Home Edition installed, the Axis 1800 Plus Ti5 gave an overall SYSmark 2001 score of 180. This looks incredibly fast, but how does the fastest that AMD can produce compare to the fastest Intel can knock out?

We installed Windows XP Home Edition on a 2GHz Pentium 4 system with 512MB of RDRAM to find out. It scored 190 in SYSmark - faster, but not 500MHz worth of speed by any means.

High-end performance continues with Leadtek's new graphics card, which uses nVidia's new GeForce3 Ti 500 chipset. Featuring shadow buffers and 3D texture support, the card has a 240MHz GPU, and 64MB of memory running at 250MHz.

Performance in 3DMark 2001 and Quake III Team Arena gave some of the fastest results we've seen, at 6,477 and 101.8 frames per second (fps) respectively. These scores are also marginally above those attained by the same card in a 2GHz Pentium 4 system - impressive stuff.

Samsung's 17in 170T flatpanel has fabulous image quality at its native resolution. Both the monitor and graphics card have DVI ports and D-SUB, with the graphics card offering an S-Video output. The combination can reach a maximum resolution of 1,280 x 1,024, although a virtual desktop of up to 2,048 x 1,590 can be achieved.

Anti-aliasing on this panel needs to be improved. Images look very jagged at anything other than 1,280 x 1,024, with text becoming illegible at times.

Creative's Audigy sound card is a sonic work of art, providing 24bit audio support and a 100dB Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). With four times the processing power of its predecessor, the Live! 5.1, and the new EAX hardware giving more atmospheric reverb, sound quality is excellent. An added bonus is its inclusion of a FireWire port.

Due to a lack of space on the sound card, the MIDI/joystick port comes on an extra bracket at the rear and blocks off one of the three spare PCI slots. The sound is pushed through Creative's trusted old familiar - the DTT2200 six-channel speakers.

Samsung supplies the optical drives, with both the DVD and CD-RW drives running at 16-speed. Western Digital's 7,200rpm hard drive has a massive 100GB of storage space, and the 56K modem comes from StarLink.

Aside from the disappointing inclusion of the free, if perfectly competent, Star Office, evesham.com has also supplied Pinnacle's Studio 7 video-editing software. The warranty is two years on-site, with the third year return to base. All in all, there's very little you can fault this system on.

Sadly, though, all this comes at a price: a huge £1,599 ex VAT. Much of this cost will be down to the flatpanel, but at £1,878.83 inc VAT it's a hefty price to pay for the latest technology.

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