September 2, 2004
As a system builder, Evesham has all the basics right. It delivers new technology quickly, offers a good online ordering service, and provides substantial warranties. Most importantly, however, it tends to produce well-specced, powerful PCs at reasonable prices. The Axis 64 34+ is an excellent example of this.
Many of the Axis 64’s components mirror those found in most comparable systems. A powerful Athlon 64 3400+ processor, 512MB of DDR400 RAM and even a 160GB Western Digital S-ATA hard drive, featuring a random access time of 13.8ms, are therefore not as remarkable as they would usually be. They’re still extremely desirable, just not unusual. Evesham has, however, pulled off one trick that separates it from the rest of the group, and from any other machine that we had seen before this month. The MSI motherboard is built around the brand- new, and much anticipated, Nvidia Nforce3 250 chipset, suffice to say that it boasts several advanced features, and enables the 64-bit processor to perform as never before. That’s why this machine managed to out-score every competitor in SYSmark 2002 with 319. Sadly, the 2004 benchmark decided not to run, no doubt denying us of our first record breaker in that test.
The benefits of this chipset can also be clearly seen in the 3D graphics performance. The Axis 64 uses the powerhouse Radeon 9800 XT card – but then so does almost every other PC on test. A 3DMark2003 score of 6,765, which again beats anything else here, can therefore only be attributed to the main chipset.
The rest of this machine’s make-up gives no cause for complaint, either. An all-Sony combination of 8x DVD/RW and 16x DVD-ROM drives, for example, is as good as it gets until dual-layer DVD recording comes along. There’s no standalone sound card, but the output from the integrated Nforce3 solution won’t disappoint anybody; this is another plus-point of Nvidia’s latest. A substantial software bundle, meanwhile, is another plus.
Externally, Evesham has lumped for its usual 'Xpider’ case. This is a little tacky, but it’s both compact and solid enough. In fact, the only reason that we can see for looking elsewhere is if you’re really desperate for a card reader. Apart from that, this system provides anything you could find on other systems, and more besides.
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