Evesham Voyager C550 review

It may have an Evesham badge on its lid, but the Voyager C550 is actually an Asus A6 in disguise.

The chassis has had a makeover, with a bright silver colour scheme and the removal of Asus's trademark metal touch pad surround, but in all other respects it's identical, with the same strengths and weaknesses as the A6VM in last month's Labs.

The chassis is deep for a widescreen notebook and the lid looks as if it could fit a standard 4:3-ratio display instead. This give you plenty of space to rest your palms while typing. The excellent keyboard has firm keys that provide good feedback. The touch pad is accurate and correctly proportioned to the screen, and the buttons below it are well made and responsive.

Below the touch pad is a series of handy short-cut keys for playing audio and video files. These extend past the lid when it's shut, and you can use them to play CDs directly without launching Windows. Unfortunately, the built-in speakers sound a little flat. This isn't helped by their position on the lower front of the chassis, where they point down towards the desk.

The 15.4" gloss display coped excellently in all our tests. The white wasn't incredibly bright, but it was very clean with no tint or backlighting problems. The colour test looked fabulous, and the greyscale test was well balanced. Mounted above is a webcam for use in web chat sessions. It's a great display that does justice to movies, games and photos.

The excellent display is certainly required, as Evesham has installed Windows Media Center Edition. This is becoming quite common, and it's a move we applaud. It offers a great streamlined interface for enjoying photos and audio files, and you have the option of adding an inexpensive TV tuner to take advantage of its excellent EPG and PVR functions. The 100GB hard disk provides sufficient storage for all these files, too.

There's more entertainment to be had from the capable ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 graphics chipset. It scored well in our tough Doom 3 test and will cope with any current game, although you may have to reduce detail levels to get demanding titles to run.

Application performance is impressive thanks to the combination of an Intel Core Duo T2400 processor and 1GB of RAM. The dual-core processor made short work of our processor-intensive video test, while the RAM helped give an impressive score in our memory-intensive image test. With an overall score of 127 in our new benchmarks, it's easily fast enough for even the toughest tasks.

The Voyager C550 is a powerful notebook that has something for everyone in terms of entertainment. It isn't cheap, though, so you'd need to make full use of its capabilities to justify the price.