Evesham Voyager C510 review

Think John Major, and the first thing that comes to mind is probably the colour grey.

We reckon whoever designed the Evesham C510 must have been a fan of the Tory ex-Prime Minister and his signature colour. The C510 is grey here, grey there and grey everywhere. Not a great first impression - but then, we've never been ones to make judgements on such a superficial basis. What matters is what it's like to use.

Looking good, feeling good

The first thing we noticed when we picked up the machine was its solidity. It didn't flex, creak or groan when given a firm squeeze or bend. This suggests it should be able to cope well with the rigours and knocks that a notebook can look forward to during a life on the road.

For such a robust machine, it's pretty light, weighing only 2.95kg. We've seen notebooks of a similar size and specification to the Evesham that weighed considerably more. You shouldn't find the C510 a burdensome travelling companion.

And once we switched the machine on and started to use it, the story got even better. Its keyboard is lovely. It was scarcely a wrench at all to move from our full-size desktop keyboard to type on the Evesham. The C510 proved very comfortable, even after long periods of typing.

The machine's mouse control trackpad is just as good. It's precise and well positioned, so that your wrists don't interfere with it as you are typing. Many track pads fall foul of this problem. If you do accidentally clip the trackpad while typing, the result can be chaotic and frustrating. The mouse pointer may leap around, messing up your work.

We were similarly impressed with the machine's screen. At 15.4in, it's pretty big. At this size, it's possible for a display to use a high resolution and still keep the icons on screen clearly visible. The Evesham's resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels offers plenty of room on the Windows desktop - handy, as it means you can have two programs windows open at the same time and be able to work comfortably in both.

Colours are accurate, too. We examined some highly-coloured digital photographs and were impressed by how natural, precise and bright the screen was.

Power and performance

Leaving its air of greyness aside, the Evesham C510 is clearly a sensibly designed and built machine. Under the skin, it's just as well conceived and executed.

At its heart, the C510 is a 'Sonoma' Centrino laptop with a 1.86GHz Pentium-M processor. Centrino is simply Intel's umbrella branding for laptops that use a Pentium-M processor, and an Intel motherboard chipset that includes wireless networking functions. Centrino is nothing new. Sonoma is. It's the codename given to the second generation of Centrino components. According to Intel, these herald greater performance than ever, as well as longer battery life. We put these claims to the test.

First, performance. The C510 scored 92.32 in our 2D application test. This is a hugely impressive score that indicates the machine will be able to cope with just about any type of mainstream software you're likely to run. The laptop did similarly well in our Doom 3 gaming test, notching up an impressive score of 20.5 frames per second. With this kind of performance, the C510 will make a solid gaming machine - a rare thing in a laptop.

Of course, all this performance can't be attributed solely to the machine's processor. After all, it's just one factor in the machine's cracking turn of speed. The other key components are its 512MB of 533MHz DDR memory (also known as PC4200 RAM), and a GeForce Go 6600 graphics chipset. These are all well-matched components that work as a team to produce this excellent performance.