Evesham Dual Ann Arbor MI

Rating: 8/10

The name 'Dual' sounds a sedate and harmonic union, with comforting redundancy like those in nuclear power stations. But the 'Dual' in this PC is a demonic coupling of raw pixel tearing horsepower and 64-bit processing, delivered in both barrels at point blank range. Even if we completely ignore the graphics aspects of this machine it's an impressive ensemble, built around NVidia's latest nForce 4 SLI chipset the ASUS AN8-SLI Deluxe. This is probably one if not the best AMD Socket 939 motherboards available, and here it's combined with the workmanlike Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB of RAM and a whisper quiet 250GB Maxtor SATA hard disk. If you need extra storage the A8N-SLI Deluxe has eight SATA connectors, and if you want external drives there's both ten USB ports and 1394 Firewire. As a bonus you also get more 1394 from the sweet sounding Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS, which is provided with a full set of six Creative Labs Inspire T7900 speakers. The whole solution is chosen from some of the best parts available, such as the Microsoft optical wireless mouse and keyboard, the superb Viewsonic VP171-2 17" TFT 8ms (Silver), Tagan 420W PSU, Sony DW-D22A DVD writer and Chenbro case. If I was building a PC for myself, most of these parts would be on my shopping list.

In most computers all this would be enough, but Evesham went a good bit further when they specified the video system. It uses two Leadtek 6600GT PCI Express cards working in unison, using NVidia's unique SLI technology. On its own a single 6600GT card is an impressive beast, but two working together tears up the screen at an improbable pace. Under comprehensive testing the dual video combo delivered between 25 and 70% more frames per second over a range of video game benchmarks. With the possible exception of the 6800 (and Ultra) PCI Express in SLI and an AMD FX class processor, it simply doesn't get much better than this. Virtually every game I tried on the dual can be played at the very highest settings and resolution without the frame rate dropping to unplayable levels. So I'm impressed, but it isn't perfect. They chose to use 128MB versions of the Leadtek 6600GT, not the 256MB models I'd have liked. They also installed XP Home, and not XP Professional, but they did provide some extra software. As standard the system comes preinstalled with MS Works 8.0 and a selection of DVD burning and viewing applications from Pinnacle. So to summarise; it looks good, works even better and isn't outrageously priced. If you want a games PC that screams for complicated geometry to render and more pixels to pummel then this must certainly be it.

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