Evesham Voyager 5600

With its 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor the Evesham 5600 storms to the top of the charts. It completed its benchmarks well and has a decent battery life.

The Voyager's graphics performance is less spectacular, but the ATI Mobility Radeon inside is a good chip and is only beaten here by the AJP 5600P with the Mobility Radeon 7500.

You can use this notebook, which sports a 20GB hard drive, for gaming, and it takes DVD playback and Powerpoint in its stride.

Mesh produces a near-identical notebook, the Discovery J800 14.1in Pro, which is housed in the same chassis as the Evesham Voyager and uses the same processor, chipset and memory. The Mesh, however, has a 30GB hard drive.

We can find few flaws in the Voyager 5600. Perhaps the greatest is that it has no floppy drive, and Evesham charges £39 ex VAT for an accessory USB drive. That's a little mean, but the rest of the hardware is decent enough, and we feel the value for money is fair.

To its credit, Evesham gives a two-year warranty and throws in two years' accidental damage insurance.

The Evesham 5600 weighs in at 3.25kg, and is a full kilogram lighter than the AJP 5600P. Despite the similar model names, they have very different chassis. We would be happy to use the Evesham as a desktop replacement, despite its slightly flexible keyboard.

The overall package is impressive and wins our Editor's Choice award in the high-end category.

Price: £1,291.33 (£1,099 ex VAT)

/b> Evesham 0870 160 9500
www.evesham.com