Evesham Evolution 2000

Well, that didn't take long. It only seems five minutes ago that the first 1Ghz PCs appeared, and now here's one with a processor running at twice that speed. In truth though, it's been over a year, so it's just Moore's Law holding true.

Aside from the Pentium 4 humming away at 2Ghz, the other core components are also very sound. The hard drive is a speedy 7200rpm 60Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus. The graphics card, unsurprisingly, is a GeForce3-based Leadtek Winfast, replete with 64Mb of DDR memory. The system itself is endowed with 256Mb of Ram, in the form of two PC800 RDRam RIMMs, with two sockets left spare.

Opening up the machine reveals an uncluttered interior and an Asus P4T motherboard, with the Pentium 4 nestling beneath a very large heat sink and fan. The heat sink seems to do its job, as it was barely warm to the touch after several hours.

An imposing feature of the system is its monitor: LG's 915FT Plus 19in model, winner of a Highly Commended award in this issue's Group Test.

You certainly won't be cursing the lack of USB sockets with this machine: you get the standard two integrated into the motherboard at the rear, two more at the front of the case, and four more, courtesy of the monitor.

And there's a Via FireWire card too, allowing you to connect a digital camcorder or external hard drives, so all the expansion bases are covered.

Alongside the FireWire PCI card are a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1, and a 56K modem, leaving two PCI slots free. The SoundBlaster's on-chip Dolby Digital 5.1 decoding capability isn't wasted, with a pair of Cambridge SoundWorks DTT2200 speakers, including centre dialog speaker, a sub-woofer and four satellites, giving great quality sound.

No system is complete these days without a CD-RW, and the Evolution 2000 sports a TEAC 16-speed CD-RW drive, plus a 16-speed Pioneer DVDRom drive.

There's enough room for expansion, with internal space for an extra hard drive, and single front panel 3.5in and 5.25in drive bays.

Slightly disappointing, given the quality of the rest of the components, is the keyboard, which is an insubstantial Accuratus model. The symmetrical Logitech wheel mouse is fine, but an optical one would have been better.

A second, slightly strange aspect, given the price of the system and the inclusion of the FireWire card, is the lack of software - just Sun's free StarOffice, version 5.1. For video editing you'll have to stick with Windows Millennium's built-in offerings.

Benchmark scores are very high. At 2Ghz, the performance advantage over the highest-clocked Pentium IIIs is really noticeable: as we've pointed out before, the NetBurst architecture of the P4 is a little slower than the old P6 core, but when you're up to these clock speeds, that deficit is more than made up for. The 2Ghz Pentium 4 is one speedy little chip.

The SYSmark 2001 score of 171 is considerably faster than the 153 of the fastest 1.4Ghz Athlon system in this month's group test.

The Seti@Home test is still slower than AMD's Athlon though, at nine minutes 41 seconds, in comparison to eight minutes 35 seconds on a 1.4Ghz Athlon machine. We also ran our 3D Studio Max benchmark. The 2Ghz completed our test scene in 17 minutes 49 seconds, compared to 1.4Ghz Athlon's 16 minutes 36 seconds. So, Intel still hasn't managed to comprehensively regain the speed crown from AMD.

Intel is about to change the number of pins its Pentium 4 processors have, from 423 on this machine, to 478 on future ones. That means new P4 processors simply won't fit into this machine. If you're thinking of buying a Pentium 4, it might be better to wait for a while. Apart from that, the Evolution 2000 is a very good package for the price.

CONTACT: Evesham
0870 728 7070
www.evesham.com