Evesham Visto review

This month sees something of a return to form for Evesham. It's been a while since the company won a Labs Winner award, but the Visto shows it hasn't lost the knack for building cracking PCs. Two big attractions are the widescreen 19in TFT and Windows Media Center Edition 2005 - a great combination for entertainment.

Add the three-year on-site warranty - something that's unmatched by any other company this month - then combine this with a micro-tower chassis that makes virtually no noise at all and you've got a superb PC. At only 375mm tall, the chassis will fit in small spaces and, despite the size, plenty is packed in. The front panel houses a DVD-ROM drive and a DVD writer, which can handle DVD+R9, DVD-R9 and DVD-RAM discs. Below this is a floppy drive/card reader combo, which can read all bar xD-Picture cards. At the bottom is a flap that hides a FireWire port, two USB 2 ports plus headphone and microphone sockets.

Unlike other PCs here, the FireWire port actually works since the MSI motherboard sports the appropriate controller. It's based on ATi's Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, although being a microATX board it doesn't support CrossFire. There are two free PCI slots (which would be ideal for TV tuners) as well as a PCI Express 1x slot - there's less expansion potential than others on test, and also note the 10/100 rather than Gigabit Ethernet.

You'll be able to record over 100 hours of TV shows on the 250GB hard disk, although note that a TV tuner and remote control will cost an extra £60. Shows will sound good on Creative's I-Trigue 3220 2.1 speaker set; it's one of the best on test, mainly because of the decent subwoofer, which adds punch to music, movies and games. Due to this quality, we don't mind the lack of surround sound.

The other peripherals are of a similar high quality. We like the Microsoft cordless keyboard and mouse, while ViewSonic's VA1912w offers a decent 1,440 x 900 resolution. It's evenly lit, not at all reflective and comes with a DVI cable. This plugs into a passively cooled GeForce 7600 GS graphics card, which is more than capable of handling HD video playback and Vista's Aero interface. For gaming, it isn't so impressive, only delivering playable frame rates in Far Cry and Call of Duty 2 at 1,024 x 768.

But this is the only drawback, and if you don't care about 3D performance, the Visto's entertainment angle and supremely quiet running are more than compensation.

Author: Jim Martin