Evesham Vale Prestige Celeron 333 review

At launch, Intel's Celeron struggled with pundits and buyers alike for two simple reasons. First, its performance suffered dramatically because it had no cache, leaving it underpowered compared with AMD's K6-2 processor line. Second, while the price of Celeron-based systems was meant to undercut the straight Pentium II substantially, this really wasn't the case. Evesham Micros, with the Vale Prestige Celeron 300 (reviewed issue 46, p145), was one of the first manufacturers to take Celeron to market, but the poor CPU performance let the system down. With this second crack at Celeron, Evesham has fared better. The new version features Intel's latest 333MHz Celeron, complete with that all-important 128Kb of Level 2 cache.

The Evesham Vale Prestige Celeron 333 is quiet and unimposing in its small, simple midi-tower case. The internal build and cabling is tidy, and upgrades should be easy. If you do get the itch for more power, Evesham's choice of motherboard is a solid foundation from which to build. Rather than opting for Intel's budget-minded EX chipset, the Vale Prestige features a Chaintech BX board, which will accept straight Pentium II processors up to 450MHz as well as the Celerons.

The Vale comes fitted with 64Mb of PC100 SDRAM which, with three of four memory DIMM slots still available, can be expanded up to a maximum of 512Mb.

Evesham has fitted a Quantum Fireball EX, offering a generous 6.4Gb of storage space. As you'd expect, it's an UltraDMA drive which makes for fast data transfer.

While CD-ROM drives still hold the larger part of the market, changes in pricing are beginning to contribute towards a swing in favour of DVD. The Vale demonstrates this by including a Panasonic DVD drive. Although there's currently little PC software that make use of the DVD's storage gains, this should change, and movies are finally beginning to appear in some larger retail outlets - the review machine shipped with a copy of Mars Attacks. The Vale Prestige doesn't use dedicated MPEG-2 decoder hardware, except for hardware-assisted motion compensation courtesy of the ATi Rage Pro chipset on the Expert 98 graphics card. The frame rate was surprisingly smooth, although the quality isn't quite good enough to make watching an entire film a satisfying experience. The card also proves its credentials as a solid all-rounder with decent 2D and respectable 3D performance.

At the other end of the VGA signal cable is a 17in CTX 1769 monitor. It's not superb: the screen is a little too curvaceous, while in bright fluorescent conditions it suffers from a distracting degree of reflectivity. In addition, the focus isn't perfectly sharp. Nonetheless, it's still a very usable display, and its ability to run at 85Hz at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 makes for a stable and comfortable image.

As for the rest of the Vale's peripherals, there's a SoundBlaster AudioPCI 64v sound card, based on an Ensoniq chipset, backed up by a pair of Teac speakers. The card itself isn't poor at all, but the same can't be said about the tiny, underpowered, low-quality speakers. Rounding off the peripherals list is one item that the Web-heavy features of Windows 98 has made almost essential for those without a faster Internet connection - a 56K internal modem.

Luckily, the factor that wrecked previous Celeron system - the poor performance of the cacheless processor - is no longer a problem. The Celeron 333MHz processor is not an Achilles' heel; instead it's a perfectly decent processor and a solid basis for a budget system. With the CPU surrounded by some decent components, this new Vale delivered a good set of results in our benchmarks, even if it was just outdone by the Mesh Elite 333EL (reviewed opposite). It's not the best system ever, or the fastest, but as a budget deal it's extremely good - hence the Recommended award.

Author: Martin Cooper