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Evesham has chosen the crucial £1,000 price point to demonstrate the virtues of Windows Vista Home Premium and constructed a system that takes good advantage of the operating system's multimedia capabilities by including a dual-digital-tuner card, a cordless mouse and keyboard bundle and a decent screen from ViewSonic.
The quality of integration is good and performance is just where it should be given the choice of components. However, Evesham, we feel, hasn't chosen the mix of components quite as well as it could have. At the £1,000 mark, 2GiB of system RAM - not 1GiB - should be a given and the graphics card - a reasonable GeForce 7900 GS - should make up more than 10% of the system's cost. The hard drive, too, could have been a newer model featuring greater on-drive cache and the 350W PSU will be under strain should you wish to upgrade parts of the PC in the future. It's these factors that take the shine away from the overall package.
We come away with the feeling that Evesham has missed an opportunity to integrate the killer £1,000 Vista-based system; one that has all the bases covered and, therefore, appeals to a wide a cross-section of potential purchasers as possible. It's not bad by any means and has enough merit to tempt the multimedia crowd, but it's no show-stopper, and therein lies the problem in recommending it.
Bottom line - you won't regret splashing out £1,000 on this machine but, really, there's better integration balance and value to be had elsewhere.
