Product Reviews

The Axis Dominator may sound like a gritty World War II first-person shooter, but it is actually a PC on which you might play such a game. It's also the first Evesham PC to use Nvidia's mid-range GeForce 7600 GT graphics card. We wanted to see if the Axis would dominate our benchmarks or be forced into unconditional surrender.

The 7600GT may not be Nvidia's top-of-the-line graphics card, but it still managed playable rounds of Doom 3 and Call of Duty 2. The Axis will play most of today's games acceptably, but if you want smooth frame rates in newer, more graphically demanding games at the highest resolutions and detail settings, you'll have to upgrade the graphics card. SLI support means you can add another 7600GT for a healthy 3D performance boost.

Windows performance was more impressive. The Axis stormed its way through our video-encoding test, although the 200GB hard disk will fill up quickly if you edit a lot of video. The dual-core

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Athlon processor also did well in our multitasking test, so you'll be able to run multiple tasks at once, such as compressing a home movie while editing your latest holiday snaps.

The widescreen ViewSonic 19" LCD is great for watching DVDs or for working on two documents side by side. Photographers won't be satisfied with the viewing angles, though; unless you're sitting directly in front of the monitor, the image loses brightness and colour accuracy. There was also some banding in our greyscale test. The Creative 2.1 speakers are fine for MP3s and games, although movie lovers may want a surround-sound set.

Accessing the inside to add upgrades is easy, though two of the three spare SATA ports are blocked by the SATA cable for the existing hard disk, as its connector points downwards. This isn't inconvenient, since there is only one 31/2" bay for adding another hard disk and replacing the cable with a standard one is easy enough.

Adding a bulky PCI card could be tricky since access to the three PCI slots is restricted by the cable connecting the front FireWire port to the motherboard. These small but restrictive flaws could have been easily avoided.

The Axis is powerful in Windows but its 3D performance will appeal only to casual gamers. We wish the hard disk were bigger and the widescreen monitor had better image quality. There are other PCs available for around the same price with similar performance in Windows but with more powerful graphics cards, larger hard disks and better expansion options.