Evesham Solar Teraxstor

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.

After a period of relative calm in the processor wars, Intel's Core 2 Extreme processors and the move to the Penryn core have given benchmark scores another push. This means not just faster Intel CPUs for the future, but faster CPUs now thanks to their overclocking ability.

Evesham shies away from doing that with this Penryn-cored PC, opting for the top-of-the-line Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650. With all four cores running at 3GHz and 12MB of cache between them, the Teraxstor scored an impressive 1.83 in our application benchmarks. Evesham assures us that overclocking it won't invalidate the warranty, either.

The roster of supporting componentry is superb. A Foxconn X38A motherboard not only uses the latest Intel X38 chipset, but provides dual support for DDR2 and DDR3 memory. To keep costs to a sensible level, Evesham has refrained from installing the latest DDR3 memory and instead opted for 4GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM. Thanks to the 32-bit version of Vista Ultimate (and the limitations of 32-bit memory addressing), only 3.3GB is usable, unless you go to 64-bit.

The Nvidia 8800 Ultra comes with 768MB of its own RAM, and if games are on your agenda it's a welcome sight. Our Call of Duty 2 benchmark was no challenge at all, with the Evesham scything through our test at 72fps. The demanding DirectX 10 title, Crysis, returned a playable 39fps with all detail settings left at high, at a reasonable resolution of 1,280 x 1,024.

You can also watch movies at high resolution thanks to the Blu-ray drive - note it reads but doesn't write to the format - and Evesham adds a DVD writer, too. Storage is catered for by two Western Digital Green Power hard drives, each with 1TB of storage. Evesham has put the drives into a striped RAID0 array, which means - despite providing faster read performance - that if one drive breaks down, all your data will be lost. We'd recommend asking Evesham to configure these as a fault-tolerant RAID1 array or just two discrete formatted drives instead, which it will be happy to do at no extra cost. But should one of the drives fail, both are mounted in a side-facing bay with quick-release tabs for easy removal, and in the unlikely event that 2TB of storage just isn't enough there are a further two hard drive bays ready and waiting.

That Foxconn motherboard isn't left wanting when it comes to upgrade potential, either. Ports are plentiful - four front-facing USB ports and one FireWire port save scrabbling under the desk every time you want to plug something in. The only annoyance is that you can't open the case door to access the optical drives if any of the front ports are in use. Round the rear of the Teraxstor there's an impressive array of sockets: another four USB ports, another FireWire port, two eSATA ports, optical and coaxial digital outputs and dual-gigabit networking.

Internally, there are three CrossFire-compatible PCI Express 16x slots, the third slot potentially allowing for a third graphics card to act as a physics co-processor in the future. The Nvidia 8800 Ultra won't be found wanting for some time, but a year or two down the line an upgrade to a triple-card ATi CrossFire system may prove attractive. Nvidia's equivalent SLI configuration, however, isn't supported.