Review: Evesham Quest A430 laptop computer

Evesham’s £699 Quest A430 is based on AMD’s Turion 64 X2 TL-50 (1.61GHz) processor, has 512MB of DDR2-533 Ram and comes in a matte black and silver chassis, weighing 3.5kg.

Our benchmarks yielded some surprising results, with the Quest finishing second to bottom in Sysmark, although it made up points in PCmark, scoring 2,865.

Bolstered by the dedicated 256MB Nvidia Geforce 6100 graphics, the Quest A430 was the only notebook to (barely) surpass 10fps in the graphics benchmarks, which won’t thrill games fans but shows that, at this price, graphics are usually sacrificed for other features.

A Sata hard disk, which is becoming commonplace in notebooks, has been squeezed into the case. At 80GB it’s adequate, but there’s a likelihood more space will be needed later on.

That will happen sooner rather than later if you take advantage of the Windows Media Center to record multimegabyte TV programmes – though the Quest lacks the TV tuners necessary for PVR use. A multiformat DVD writer is at hand for archiving your files and documents, though.

The Quest includes a superb X-Bright 17in LCD widescreen display, which is capable of a maximum resolution of 1,440x900, and a good selection of ports and sockets dotted around the case.

The big screen, however, does have implications for battery life. At about 2 hours 26 minutes before needing a recharge, the A430 may not be the best choice for road warriors.

Design-wise, this notebook has a lot of room to rest hands when typing, and a dedicated numeric keypad. However, some keys have been truncated to fit, including the Enter button, which takes getting used to.

The case itself is well made, with shortcut keys above the keyboard and memory card slots, audio and a Firewire port in a cut-out panel on the front.

See full performance results for Evesham Quest A430 laptop
Compare to all laptop performance results

This article is part of a group test of laptop computers costing under £700.
See also:
Asus F3F
Hi-Grade A9700
MSI Megabook M662
MV Mobeus 13"
Toshiba Satellite A110-275.

Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above.