Product Reviews

Isn't the quick march of technological progress great? It gives us a regular supply of super-fast kit to drool over, and some brilliant bargains that we can actually afford. Take the 22in widescreen TFT with this PC. A couple of years ago, something similar might have cost as much as this whole system. Add cutting-edge components like an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a bagful of RAM and nVidia's brand new graphics card - based in its monstrously powerful 8800 GTX - and the pound change from £900 seems pretty generous.

That dual-core processor is running at a fairly high frequency too. 2.13GHz, which may not sound much compared to the heady 3.8GHz of old Pentium 4s or the 3GHz+ of AMD Athlon 64s, but it gets through more work in each clock cycle ('GHz', gigahertz, means billions of cycles per second) than its predecessors - so much, in fact, that it stormed though our benchmarks considerably faster than any Pentium 4.

There's something else that helps the Solar 8600GTS to its high benchmark score, and that's the luxurious 2GB of RAM. Now, you may have heard rumours that Windows Vista 'needs' 2GB, or even 4GB, to run smoothly. In fact, it runs fine with 1GB - but 2GB certainly gives an extra edge to things. Some games run more smoothly with the extra headroom, while you'll see less of the Vista equivalent of the hourglass cursor when batch-processing photos or doing major video work. If you're in the habit of running several applications at once and editing large files such as high-resolution photos, you'll undoubtedly notice the difference. RAM isn't terribly expensive at the moment, but it's good to know you've got enough right from the start.

The Windows Vista question

Pretty much every PC on sale now, including this one, will have Vista installed, so it's fairly academic to ponder whether or not you want Microsoft's new operating system. There are still a few teething troubles with Vista, but nothing so severe that most users should be put off; read our troubleshooting guide and make your own mind up, but one thing's for sure, it's a lot less hassle to get Vista with a new PC than to upgrade an old one.

One of the biggest concerns is the impact on gaming performance, with both ATi and nVidia, who make the leading graphics card chipsets, having trouble adapting to Vista's demands. Compared to Windows XP, Vista has a new way of handling the driver software that tells a graphics card how to behave, so this needs to be reworked. It's obviously a hard task, because even now, over six months after the final version of Vista was sent into the world of PC manufacturers, nVidia is still saying performance is 10% down, while ATi has been releasing drivers with only incremental performance improvements. But don't despair, because even with imperfect drivers there's plenty of gaming performance on offer. Games depend heavily on your

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graphics card, and at the heart of the Evesham Solar 8600GTS, as its name implies, is nVidia's brand new GeForce 8600 GTS, which follows in the footsteps of the awesome GeForce 8800 series. Like those, the 8600 GTS has a core of 'stream processors', a bank of versatile pipelines through which all sorts of data can flow. Unlocking their full power will take a game compatible with DirectX 10, of which Crysis looks to be the first - and it's still months away. As things stand now, we can say that the 8600 GTS is a very powerful card, so its inclusion in this affordable PC is perhaps a surprise.

But it's a good design decision by Evesham, because you need serious graphics muscle to play games at the full resolution of the 22-inch screen. As with any LCD, switching to lower resolutions brings fuzziness; but creating 1,680 x 1,050 pixels at a fast enough rate for gameplay is a tough job. This card is up to it, playing all the toughest games with barely a stutter, and even if you can't use high levels of anti-aliasing (AA) to smooth jagged edges or anisotropic filtering (AF) to sharpen surfaces such as paths and walls, at least you can comfortably increase the in-game quality settings to maximum without a worry.

That 22-inch screen gives plenty of space, but the quality's lacking. A corona of light bleeds from the lower edge of the bezel; it's only really noticeable when viewing dark images, but every time you turn on the PC and see the self-test screen, with its white writing on black, you'll be reminded. The second problem is a narrow contrast range: dark shades merge into solid black and light shades into white. It may not sound a huge issue, but it leads to a lack of detail in brightly lit areas of photos and videos and flat, lifeless shadows. Still, the colours are vibrant, so even if the gloom from which that monster pounces is a little vague, it'll still look vividly scary.

Supply and demand

While we're nit-picking, we also have concerns about the power supply in the main PC box. It's rated at 350W, the absolute minimum stated by nVidia for a dual-core processor system using a GeForce 8600 GTS. That's not a great place to be, especially if you may want to upgrade anything later; since it's on the limit, something as trivial as a PCI card or an extra hard disk might push it into instability or even failure to start up. We raised this with Evesham, who agreed, and will upgrade the power supply unit (PSU) to a 600W model for £60 on request when you order.

A few compromises are inevitable when packing high-spec components into an affordable PC, and while it's a shame that one of them is the thing you'll spend most of your time looking at (the screen), there are plenty of positives. Not least is the excellent warranty: with two years of onsite cover and a third return-to-base, it certainly gives peace of mind.

That's not to mention the oodles of power on offer, both when working in Vista and when gaming. And while the scores are high now, they're set to improve further as nVidia gets the hang of writing new drivers for Vista over the next few months. Despite its speed, it's not a particularly noisy PC. No corners have been cut on the version of Vista, which is Home Premium, so you get the funky Aero effects and the elegant Media Center to play with. So while the rapid pace of technology may make new kit age more quickly than you'd like, it's also indispensable when it brings us bargains like this.