Evesham Voyager C720DC review

Playing the latest games on a notebook has always been expensive when compared to using a desktop PC.

However, having all that computing power in a notebook can be useful. You can transport it to a friend's house to play games, and put it away in a cupboard when you've finished with it.

Evesham's Voyager C720DC has the latest graphics chipset, the Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX. It was incredibly fast in our tests, scoring 127.9fps in our notebook Doom 3 benchmark. We tried running our desktop 3D graphics benchmark, Call of Duty 2, to give it a tougher test and it returned a smooth 45.6fps. We increased the resolution to match that of the display, for optimal graphical quality, and it still managed a playable 37.6fps. It's roughly equivalent to our current favourite desktop card, the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro.

The rest of the notebook's specification is just as impressive. It uses the fastest Intel Core 2 Duo processor available, the 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo T7600, and has 2GB of RAM. It stormed through our benchmarks, and will quickly complete any task.

We've seen this particular notebook chassis from a number of manufacturers before. Every time we see it we're surprised by how big and ugly it is, and the lightly textured silver plastic finish looks a bit cheap. It weighs a cumbersome 5.2kg, so you won't want to carry it for long, but the large size means it has all the ports you'll need, including four USB2 and a DVI video output.

Any complaints are blown away when the large 17in display comes to life. It's not the brightest screen we've seen, but it produces a good, clean white with even backlighting. Colours look vibrant and contrast levels are impressive. With a high native resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels, there's acres of desktop space in which to run complex applications or play games at high resolutions.

All that space is particularly welcome due to the installed Windows Vista Ultimate operating system, where the new sidebar takes up a good portion of your screen. The Ultimate edition has all the features of the Home Premium and Business editions in one. Media Center is included, and you can add a compatible USB TV tuner to make the notebook a fully featured PVR.

Windows Vista will run most DirectX games without problems. However, older titles are less likely to work properly. We had trouble getting our Doom 3 benchmark to run on Vista, and had to install Windows XP to get it working properly. Doom 3 uses OpenGL rather than DirectX, so you may experience problems with other OpenGL titles.

It isn't a new chassis, but Evesham has filled it with the best new hardware and operating system available. If you need a notebook that can do everything, this is it. It's just a shame it's so ugly.

Author: Seth Barton