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Evesham Athlon XP 1900+ PC

A blisteringly fast Athlon XP processor beats at the heart of this PC.

Price: £1761.33

Manufacturer: Evesham

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Verdict

A very respectable machine from Evesham, although you'd be better off buying the Axis 1800+ Ti5 reviewed in the December 2001 issue of PCW, as the systems are very similar. But if you prefer a CRT monitor to a TFT, this is the one to go for.

Lars-Goran Nilsson, Personal Computer World 10 Dec 2001

With the introduction of the Pentium 4, AMD has been playing catch-up in the megahertz war, and in the December 2001 issue of PCW we saw the company introduce a performance rating for its processors. The latest chip from AMD is known as the Athlon XP 1900+, and is clocked at 1.6GHz.

The new Athlon XP processors perform very well, and the 1900+ is one of the fastest processors we've tested. Evesham has also included a brand new Maxtor D740X 80GB, a 7,200rpm hard drive that supports the new UltraDMA133 interface.

This increases the theoretical data throughput of the EIDE interface to 133Mbytes/sec. This sounds impressive, but bear in mind that single EIDE hard drives can't deliver data fast enough to fill this. According to Maxtor's website, the maximum data transfer speed of this drive is 53.2Mbytes/sec. An EIDE RAID setup is another story; with two or more drives running simultaneously, the increased bandwidth may help. Doubtless we'll find out the answer to that question over the coming months.

There aren't any motherboards around that support UltraDMA133 directly, so Evesham has plugged the Maxtor drive into a Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller with two internal EIDE connectors. Add this to the two EIDE connectors on the motherboard, and you can connect up to eight EIDE devices to this machine. Promise claims it can support drives up to 144 Petabytes in size.

The motherboard in this system is also a newcomer. The Asus A7V266-E board is based on VIA's new KT266A chipset. Fitted to the board is a healthy 512MB of PC2100 DDR memory, made up of two 256MB modules. That leaves one memory slot free.

If you're a gamer you'll love this system, as it comes with a GeForce3 Ti500 graphics card with 64MB of DDR graphics memory. Our 3D benchmarks really show it off.

Furthermore, you'll find a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy sound card and a set of the new Creative Inspire 5300 speakers. This combination produces excellent-quality Dolby Digital playback and sounds great in games too.

The Audigy card features a FireWire port, which is great for home movie buffs, but Creative also supplies software to enable you to utilise the FireWire port as a very fast network connection, up to 200Mbits/sec.

A 56K PCI modem is the only other expansion card, and around the front you'll find a very fast Mirai 24x 10x 40x CD writer and a 16-speed Samsung DVD-ROM drive.

The Axis 1900 Plus Ti5 ships with a superb LG Flatron 915FT Plus monitor, which is one of the best 19in flat displays in its price bracket. It is capable of flicker-free resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200 at 75Hz.

The operating system of choice is Windows XP Home Edition and you also get a copy of Works Suite 2002, which should keep most users happy.

Even though this is a very fast machine, it is only six points faster in SYSmark 2001 than Evesham's own Athlon XP 1800+. It's also only marginally faster in 3DMark 2001 with a score of 6,552. But, interestingly, it's slower in Quake III Team Arena by 2.3fps.

That's fast for a 1.6GHz chip. It can't better a 2GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of RDRAM that we benched - this got a SYSmark score of 190 - but it's looking as though AMD is getting close to Intel in performance terms.

This is certainly a very impressive system, but it isn't much cheaper than the Evesham we reviewed last month. It has different speakers, processor and a Promise controller, admittedly, but these changes don't make up for the money saved by opting for a 19in CRT monitor rather than the 17in Samsung TFT in the previous system.

One thing it does demonstrate, however, is that AMD will continue to be a thorn in Intel's side for some time to come.

Contact
Evesham: 0870 160 9500 www.evesham.com

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