Group test: Evesham Quest Nemesis laptop

When spending the equivalent of a family holiday on a notebook computer, you should expect more than just the latest hardware components. For this kind of money, build quality and aesthetics are also important.

At 5.2kg, Evesham’s Quest Nemesis may be big and heavy but its finish stands out from the crowd.

Corners are rounded, the screen hinge moulds into the glossy media-shortcut section, the elongated mouse button services both left and right clicks and a huge hand rest area makes typing comfortable.

Inside the chassis is an AMD Turion64 Mobile ML-44 (2.41GHz) processor and 1GB of DDR400 memory.

Achieving a Sysmark 2004 SE score of 174 and a PCmark05 result of 3,926 puts it at the lower end of this group test’s league table, which considering how good it looks is disappointing.

Great graphics
But to compensate, the dual 256MB Nvidia Geforce Go 7900GS graphics chips provided us with an electric score of 9,653 in 3Dmark05; over 1,500 points more than its nearest rival, the Rock Xtreme CTX T2500.

Its 58.44fps in Far Cry wasn’t quite what we expected, but having two graphics cards working in tandem should let you max out the quality settings with little impact on frame rates.

However, like most of its rivals, battery life suffers, achieving just one hour, 34 minutes in Mobilemark 05’s productivity test.

Evesham has equipped the Quest Nemesis with Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) operating system and two 100GB hard disks arranged in a Raid 0 format.

At its native resolution of 1,680x1,050, the 17in WSXGA widescreen display looks super-sharp and its X-Bright technology gives Windows a bright, colourful feel.

All the usual ports and sockets are dotted around the case, but there’s no TV tuner. This will have to be bought separately to get the full benefits of Windows MCE.

This article is part of a group test of £1,599 laptops .
See also:
Rock Xtreme CTX T2500
How Vista will affect notebooks .
Other reviews can be read via our pdf downloads above
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