Evesham Mini PC Plus

Details

Let's have a look at some of the gubbins that come with the Evesham system.

You can see here the size of the external PSU unit - not that big, huh? The back of the unit contains the ports for connecting up the machine, including DVI, TV-out, ethernet, USB, firewire and audio. In the box you get an a funky converter to turn the TV-out into component, as well as a DVI to VGA converter and the software pack, including the proper Windows MCE disk and Roxio disk burning software.

Internals

Unlike the Mac Mini, there's no need for a putty knife to crack it open. If you peel off the rubber base material in the corners, there are four screws that allow you to take the top off and get access to the internals.

Let's cover the obvious. The Pentium M chip is located underneath the heatsink on the left hand side. You can see the single SO-DIMM memory slot - if you want to upgrade, you're going to have to buy a new stick and eBay your old one. You can also see the empty (on this machine) mini-PCI slot, which you can have filled with a WiFi card if you like.

The hard drive and optical drive are obviously laptop versions. This is a 80GB 5400RPM, but you can get up to 100GB 7200RPM. The 7200 is obviously going to generate more heat and noise, and you might think that keeping things cooler and quieter is a good trade-off for a small speed loss.

The DVD drive is an eight-speed DVD-R writer. We're disappointed that there's no digital audio out on the back of this machine - analogue connections are fine, but they are certainly not optimal for connecting to a living room sound system.

The graphics system is what it is. It's perfectly fine for hooking up to an analogue or digital display, but don't expect to do any hardcore gaming with it. You might get a bit of CS 1.6 going, but that's about it.