Product Reviews

IMPORTANT NOTE
This review was written before PC Pro became aware of the current situation at Evesham, now run by a different management team. Currently, PC Pro does not recommend anyone buys an Evesham system.

Building a high-end PC is deceptively tricky - it isn't simply a matter of stuffing expensive components into a luxurious case and calling it a Rolls-Royce. There are many considerations: internal build quality, system stability and, of course, customer service. It's no good spending four figures on a system if the company that sold it to you isn't prepared to stand behind it. With the Evesham 8800Ultra SLI, you get a top-end system from a manufacturer that was voted by PC Pro readers as the best desktop PC manufacturer in our most recent Reliability & Service Awards.

In terms of components, it's all but impossible to find an area in which Evesham could improve. You could, in theory, add another couple of hard disks to the RAID0 array, but with two 500GB Western Digital drives providing 1TB of storage, we wouldn't expect to run out of space soon. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700, which runs at 2.66GHz on each of its four cores. This power is backed by 2GB of 800MHz RAM, which makes the 8800Ultra perfect for tasks such as video editing.

But it's in the gaming arena that this PC can take on all-comers. Nvidia has only just announced its 8800 Ultra cards, but Evesham has already combined the phenomenal processing power of two of them into an SLI array. The immediate result is extra noise from the two cooling fans, but this is also the most graphically powerful PC we've ever seen. Each card has 768MB of 2.16GHz RAM and a core CPU clock

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speed of 612MHz, as well as 128 stream processors, so combining them produces awesome results.

Our Call of Duty 2 benchmark, for instance, ran at a thrilling 64fps at 1,600 x 1,200. The first DirectX 10 game benchmark available, the splendid-looking Lost Planet, ran at an average of 40fps, even at 1,600 x 1,200 with all the graphic options set at their highest. Company of Heroes with its DirectX 10 patch ran at just below 30fps at 1,280 x 1,024 with all the settings at their highest. This may not sound spectacularly fast, but bear in mind that it's early days for DirectX 10 support in drivers (not to mention the games) - we'd expect big improvements over the coming months.

The rest of the components are similarly top-notch. The motherboard is the eVGA nForce 680i, which runs Nvidia's nForce 680i chipset, and offers such niceties as twin Gigabit Ethernet ports, 7.1 audio and six SATA ports. The sturdy case has plenty of future potential too, with grilles at the top, sides and bottom to ensure decent ventilation. The power supply is another important consideration: Nvidia recommends a 500W power supply for a PC with a single 8800 Ultra, and the 850W Cooler Master PSU presented no stability problems.

Evesham's attention to detail inside this PC is evident. Each graphics card needs two power connectors, and when you factor in the two hard disks and twin optical drives there's plenty of potential for a rat's nest of wiring, but Evesham has made judicious use of cable wraps to make sure everything's accessible when it comes to spring cleaning.

But as lovely as it all is, you can't ignore that price. The 8800Ultra lacks nothing in terms of components, but the peripheral set is non-existent. You'll need a decent, high-resolution monitor to take advantage of this system: BenQ's FP241W will cost you just under £600, for example, and there's no keyboard and mouse.

Evesham offers two years' on-site coverage and a third year of return-to-base cover, but that's the least we'd expect for a PC that costs as much as a new kitchen. This isn't a PC for anyone who's less than obsessed with the cutting-edge of gaming, and such buyers are well-advised to opt for something more modest in the graphics department - Evesham's Solar Quattro G8, for example. But for the gamer with generous cash reserves, this is a dream come true, and one that we've been waiting a long time to see.