Introduction
The perfect £1000 PC?
In some ways, the sub £1000 PC market is the most important. It's a psychological market more than anything, the jump to four figures of spending is significant. So provided a PC manufacturer can produce a PC under that price point, there's a good chance they'll attract people looking to get themselves a decent PC without breaking the bank.
However saving money in the PC sector doesn't mean you buy badly. These days £1000 gets you a packed PC, stuffed to the brim with cutting edge technology and features. Every discerning PC manufacturer on the planet will produce a PC to this price point, whether it be £1000 here, $1000 in the US or the same significant figure elsewhere.
The nature of the market means that all PC makers are competing for sales as aggressively as ever. Undercutting pricing to gain sales and making a loss on a component that is guaranteed to catch your eye is common practice.
So in steps Evesham, a company we've seen before at HEXUS, with a sub £1000 entrant that still endeavours to give you a mass of computing power. The name gives most of it away, their Axis 64 3000+ obviously packing that most famous of current processing punches, the AMD Athlon 64, this time in Model 3000+ guise.
The Model 3000+ is a new processor, recently released to good reviews and commentary from the online hardware technology press. With the introduction of Model 3400+ to push pricing down, Model 3000+ and Model 3200+ are attractive buys, enabling you to get in on the high performance x86 act without spending a fortune. Therefore in the pursuit of building as high performance a PC as possible for your £1000, Model 3000+ makes a big case for itself.
With 2000MHz CPU clock and 512KB of L2 cache memory, it seeks to offer the same raw processor performance as Model 3200+, running at the same clock speed as its stablemate. When you're not cache limited, remember the Model 3200+ has 1MB L2, the Model 3000+ should be no slower. It's only in cache limited cases, where the cache size is having a significant effect on performance, that Model 3000+ should be noticably slower. So while Model 3000+ isn't that much cheaper than Model 3200+, its real world performance should seek to make it quite the performance bargain. We'll soon see how the Axis 64 performs, but on the surface of things it looks like Evesham have made an inspired processor selection.
We know what's beating at the heart of the Axis 64 and we know the price point, that should be enough to get a lot of people salivating at the prospect of picking one up. Let's examine the rest of the system to see if it matches up to the initial premise of high performance and features, for low dollar.
