Eveshamvale Athlon 700 GeForce 256 review

The processor war is reaching fever pitch. AMD is unveiling its 700MHz Athlon, while at the same time Intel is rolling out its copper-based 733MHz Pentium III. However, both chip manufacturers have their fair share of problems. AMD is still battling against low supplies of Slot A motherboards, made worse by the recent Taiwanese earthquake. Meanwhile, Intel's delays in producing Rambus-supporting chipsets may be pushing the patience of Tier 1 OEMs.

In this type of situation, smaller manufacturers are able to react quickest to market changes. With a loyalty to no-one, Evesham has been able to role out its Athlon 700 GeForce 256 - straight into the hands of those hungry for the ultimate in PC power.

At the heart of this system is one of the most powerful processors currently available. In addition, any slack in the graphics system is capably addressed by the inclusion of nVIDIA's revolutionary GeForce 256 (previewed issue 61, p166). With 128Mb of RAM supplied on one DIMM, two slots are left free for upgrades.

Removing the system case reveals Evesham's usual high-quality setup. The available upgrade paths are via the two spare internal 3.5in bays, three vacant PCI slots, and two free ISA slots (with one shared PCI/ISA backplate cutout).

Evesham supplies a large hard drive to complement the machine's huge processing power. The 27.3Gb Maxtor 6800 Plus is connected via the UltraDMA/66 protocol directly to the MicroStar motherboard, ensuring that the fastest possible transfer rates are available to the system bus. The formatted capacity of 25.4Gb should cater for your permanent storage needs for some time. Even if you do run out of space, important data can be offloaded to the EIDE internal Iomega Zip 250 drive.

The system case only has one external 3.5in bay for a floppy drive, so the Zip drive uses up one of the 5.25in bays. This leaves only one external bay free for an additional device, such as a CD-RW, a tape drive or one of the up-and-coming DVD-writers.

The fastest DVD player currently available, Pioneer's ten-speed DVD-114, which has a theoretical 40-speed CD-ROM read, takes the other 5.25in bay. This is supported by Creative Labs' new SoundBlaster Live! Player 1024 sound card connected to VideoLogic's DigiTheatre Dolby digital speakers. The sound card is an improvement on the previous 'value' version in several areas, but most interesting is the addition of an S/P-DIF digital out port for channelling AC-3 sound to a ProLogic decoder. This means that you can send 5.1 channel digital cinema theatre sound to supporting speakers. The VideoLogic speakers are the perfect supporting choice, since they include a decoder box.

CyberLink's PowerDVD player is supplied for software DVD movie playback, and even in the absence of any hardware decoder this is assisted by the powerful processor and graphics subsystem. The only other software is the familiar SmartSuite Millennium Edition 9.1, so any immediate office needs should also be covered. Evesham has also supplied its favoured Diamond SupraExpress V.90 PCI modem for Internet connectivity.

As a complement to all this impressive kit, a 19in Taxan monitor based on Mitsubishi's Diamondtron Natural Flat tube technology is supplied for the display. The Ergovision 780 TCO 99 (reviewed issue 61, p170) is a high-quality product, providing rich, vibrant colours across all areas of the screen. A 0.25mm aperture grille pitch ensures that text is represented with precision up to a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 at 85Hz. The comprehensive OSD gives excellent control over image optimisation.