Evesham Decimator 3800

Evesham will also be selling a version of the Decimator with identical specifications except for a 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor. The Decimator EE, as it will be known, will cost an extra £250 including VAT. As well as 2MB of Level 3 cache, the newest Extreme Edition can handle a 1,066MHz FSB (front side bus) up from 800MHz, which is also supported by the 925XE motherboard chipset in this machine. This should allow for better-synchronised, higher-frequency data transfers between the CPU and 533MHz DDR2 memory.

But theory aside, dropping in a 3.46GHz Pentium 4EE and testing it with this configuration yielded an improvement of just 4.5 per cent in our benchmarks. Unless media encoding (an area in which Extreme Edition processors do even better than standard Pentium 4s) is your bag, our opinion of the Extreme Edition remains unchanged: the performance enhancement simply isn't worth the premium.

If your heart is set on a high-powered Intel machine, the Decimator may suit as long as you like the styling. For a super high-end system in terms of both raw computing and graphics power, however, we'd still go for Scan's AMD FX-55-equipped White Cobra, albeit at a far higher price.

Author: David Fearon