Evesham Axis 1900 Plus

Evesham.com certainly knows how to put together a great value-for-money PC. The Axis 1900+ defeats every other PC in this Labs thanks to a perfect balance between features and performance. The main number cruncher is the Athlon XP 1900+, which is installed into an Asus A7V266-E motherboard. With 512Mb of DDR memory fitted, our 2D benchmarks were no problem for this PC - it stormed into first place with an excellent result of 5.70.

The front panel reveals the familiar pair of Samsung optical drives - a 24-speed CD-RW and a 16-speed DVD-ROM - leaving one 5.25in and one 3.5in bay available for future use. Inside the two-tone chassis resides a 80Gb Maxtor D740X hard disk, the joint largest on test along with the Poweroid, plus a spare internal 3.5in bay.

But, while the Poweroid makes do with a 17in monitor - albeit our A-listed Iiyama Vision Master Pro 413 - the Axis 1900+ boasts the 19in Samsung 957DF. The DF suffix stands for DynaFlat, referring to the flat shadow-mask CRT. The image isn't as bright or clear as the Iiyama's, but the extra screen real estate more than makes up for this. Driving the monitor is an ATi Radeon 8500LE, one of the fastest 3D accelerators around. Evidence of this is clear from the Axis' 3DMark2001 score of 7,387 - the second fastest we saw and only a shade behind the 7,552 scored by the similarly equipped Poweroid.

The audio subsystem receives the Creative treatment; an Audigy Player sends its six channels to the DTT2200 speakers for Dolby Digital in movies and games. With the V.90 modem in place, there are two PCI slots free and there's a single DIMM socket for adding another gigabyte of RAM.

Build quality is practically faultless. Cable wraps and ties keep things neat and tidy, leaving unobstructed access to the CPU and memory sockets, while the spare power connectors lie ready to plug into new drives. Like many machines this month, an additional case fan helps keep temperatures down. On top of all this, the three-year, on-site warranty gives extra peace of mind; only Mesh can match this offering. Rounding the system off with a sturdy Microsoft keyboard and Logitech optical mouse, evesham.com is back on form this month and no other machine can touch the Axis 1900+ for all-round greatness.