First things first: the Evesham Decimator has the best name we've heard in quite a while. It also has the looks to match. A bit bigger than the average tower, it sports an all-over brushed-metal finish with a stylish swing-out door covering the front panel.

The door itself houses a circular cut-away with an LCD panel, showing the date and time, temperature of various sensors in the case, and the (many) fan speeds. It's certainly a step away from Evesham's standard look and feel, and we like it.

The Decimator is built around some of the fastest components available. There's a top-of-the-line 3.8GHz Pentium 4, mounted on an MSI 925X motherboard, 1GB of 533MHz memory and an ATI Radeon X850XT-based video card in a 16x PCI Express slot.

A pair of 250GB Sata drives provides 500GB of hard disk storage, chained together in a Raid 0 array. This makes performance faster than a standard configuration, especially when reading and writing large files, but the downside is that you could end up losing the majority of your data should one of the units fail.

Two spare Sata connectors on the motherboard allow for additional drives, and the case has three empty external 5.25in bays. Both external 3.5in bays are taken, one with a 10-in-1 card reader and the other with a floppy drive. You also get a Sony DVD-Rom and a 16-speed dual-layer DVD writer.

Two free PCI slots allow for extra expansion and two huge fans, acting as general system coolers as well as specifically cooling the video and PCI cards, cover the whole slot-section of the board. The memory takes up two DDR slots, leaving another two for future expansion.

Considering how much is inside the case - making full use of the 420w power supply - it's all well packed away, and good use has been made of the clips on the case to tidy the cabling. The case is spacious and quieter in use than you might expect.

Instead of burdening the front of the case (and obstructing the door) with more sockets, the top holds a plastic housing that conceals a pair of USB connectors, headphone and microphone sockets and a Firewire port, as well as another fan.

There are four more USB sockets on the back, along with another Firewire port, surround-sound outputs and an optical S/PDIF port, plus keyboard, mouse, parallel, serial modem and network connectors. The Radeon includes DVI and S-video outputs as well as VGA.

Given the name and specification, we expected top performance and the system scored a Sysmark rating of 229, one of the highest we've seen. It would also make a great gaming PC, and its 3Dmark05 score of 6,035 sets a new standard.

Bizarrely, given the specification and full tower configuration, the system comes with Windows XP Media Center 2005. It's useful to have the extra facilities, but the Evesham Ebox seems more in tune with the idea of a living room-friendly consumer device. We'd also expect a TV tuner, although technically this isn't required.

The only downside to the system is the price. You won't get much change from £2,500, a lot even for a PC with as much packed into its case as this one.

Contact:
Evesham Computers 0870 160 9500
www.evesham.com

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