Evesham Quest A220Plus review

Evesham submitted the Quest A220 to our Labs test of budget notebooks in Shopper December 2005.

This example has better specifications than its predecessor, and the price has risen from £586 to £699. We were interested to see if this upgraded model can compete at this higher price.

The notebook has a 15.4" widescreen display with a 1,280x800 resolution. The display itself is of excellent quality and produced a clear bright white with no tinges of colour or uneven backlighting. Greyscales were smooth and colours were bright. For a notebook at this price, it's great.

The chassis is also excellent, with little flex in the body. Unfortunately, the plastic casing feels a little cheap. There are all the usual ports, with four USB2 ports arranged in pairs on either side for easier use. Headphone and microphone sockets are conveniently placed on the front of the unit.

The keyboard is spacious and doesn't flex, but the keys lack feedback. The touch pad is acceptable, although it should have been shaped to match the widescreen display. The speakers are good for a notebook, with music sounding crisp and clear.

The chassis has a number of features that make it more media-friendly. You can boot the notebook into media player mode instead of Windows. This lets you play DVD, CD and MP3 files from the optical drive. DVD playback is acceptable, but seemed a little fuzzy. The chassis has dedicated controls on the front, and there's also a remote control tucked away in the PC Card slot which can be used to control applications such as Media Player.

Inside the chassis a 1.6GHz AMD Turion MT-30 processor and 512MB of RAM keep all your media playing smoothly. A 60GB hard disk is provided for storage, with a two-layer DVD writer for backups.

Benchmark scores are a little disappointing compared to equivalently priced Intel-powered notebooks. That said, there is plenty of power for day-to-day tasks, as shown by the overall Shopper benchmark score of 66. If you plan to do a lot of photo editing or media encoding, however, you should look elsewhere. We found that 3D performance is very poor from the SiS chipset, scoring a lowly 156 in 3DMark03, so you won't be playing any games on this notebook.

The Quest A220Plus sets out to improve on what was a good budget notebook. Unfortunately it runs into some very tough competition in the £700 market, where its Turion processor can't compete. The media features and display are good, but better notebooks are available for the same price in this month's Labs on page 150.