Evesham Quest A620 with FX-60

Conclusions...

Performance: The performance of the machine is nothing to sniff about and we were really impressed with it in the range of tasks that we threw at it when the machine was plugged in. The downside of the fantastic mains performance is the battery performance, or lack thereof. With such a powerful CPU and graphics subsystem, you're never going to get much out of this system on the move.

We wrote a portion of this article on the system without the power adapter plugged in and we found the system heading into hibernate mode within the hour. That was using wireless networking, a moderate screen brightness with maximum power saving options turned on.

Specification: The specification is pretty good, but as aforementioned, we feel that there could be some improvements made to it. The first being the amount of memory - you'd expect 2GB of memory with a gaming-orientated power users system. It's good that the option is there to upgrade, but we think that it should be the default option in a machine with this kind of power.

The second option that we think should be changed is the hard drive configuration. We think that a RAID 0 array is not an ideal configuration in a machine that you are likely to depend on. Laptop hard drives tend to be knocked about a lot more than their desktop siblings, meaning that they're more likely to get damaged. The last thing you want is for one of the hard drives to get damaged, because that ultimately means that you're going to lose everything in your RAID 0 array because there is no redundancy.

It's also questionable whether the FX-60 is actually worth the additional £339.57 including VAT over the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which comes clocked at 2.4GHz - 200MHz slower than the FX-60. However, if you want a portable desktop with the fastest-available consumer processor, you'll take the increased cost on the chin.

Form Factor / noise: Considering the power of the components that are installed in this system, we think that it copes pretty well under load. Admittedly, it can get a little noisy, but it's not much noiser than an equally powered desktop gaming system. After all, that's what this system is designed to replace.

Value: A machine like this doesn't come without a hefty price tag. At over £2500 for the base version and nearly £2650 with our modifications to the specification, it's hard to recommend it as an out and out gaming system. Especially when its possible to specify an Evesham Voyager with 2GB of memory and a single 100GB 7200RPM hard disk drive for £1833.98 including VAT. Admittedly, you're not going to get the same kind of multi-tasking performance on a single core Pentium M, but that system is cooler, quieter and is only two thirds of the weight of this machine.

Until Evesham makes Core Duo notebooks with GeForce Go 7800 GTX graphics cards available, you're limited to a choice between a Pentium M 770 or one of the Athlon 64 X2 options. The problem with the Athlon 64 X2's is that they emit massive amounts of heat in comparison to the Pentium M's, which ultimately means that the system is going to be louder, heavier and also warmer, too.

Final thoughts...

There's no doubting that this machine is damn fast, but we have to question its market as a high end gamers machine. Now that NVIDIA's partners, including Evesham, are shipping SLI-enabled notebooks, this machine is no longer the fastest-available gaming system. The SLI-enabled notebooks also appear to cost about the same as this machine, too.

At this moment, the ideal single card notebook solution would be based on one of Intel's Core Duo processors with either a GeForce Go 7800 GTX or an ATI Mobility Radeon X1800XT. Unfortunately, Evesham currently doesn't offer that configuration and you're limited to either a Pentium M, Turion 64 or Athlon 64 X2 processor.

Desktop processors in small confined spaces only mean masses of heat and additional weight to keep them cool - we suggest waiting for something similar based on either Core Duo or one of the upcoming dual core Turion processors.