Evesham Quest A420 review

If Evesham's Quest A420 looks familiar, it's because it has the same chassis as the Evesham Voyager A420 reviewed in Labs, page 68.

Several compromises were made for the notebook in the Labs section to hit our £699 price limit, but the Quest A420's higher price gets you a much better-rounded computer.

There's a faster 2.0GHz Turion processor and 1GB of RAM, helping the notebook to achieve a respectable score in our application benchmarks. It's a massive increase of almost 40 points over the £699 version, and means it will be able to deal with most tasks you're likely to undertake on a notebook.

Its 3D performance is just as impressive. It managed a healthy score in our Doom 3 test, so you can play any modern 3D game. We ran our tough desktop Call of Duty 2 test on it as well. It scored just 11.8fps, but with reduced detail settings it was fine, and still looked very impressive.

The display was a key factor in our gaming enjoyment. It's bright and crisp and has a gloss coating to improve contrast and colour vibrancy. Its response time was quick enough to keep up with our tests, while the 1,280x800 widescreen resolution is ideal for the latest games. There were some unusual speckled areas in our colour test, though, so it won't be so great for fine image-manipulation work.

The chassis is OK, but it's made from a slightly metallic-grey plastic. The battery is large and hangs out of the back, but still provides only average life. There's a good range of ports around the edges, including four USB2, DVI and FireWire. The speakers are disappointing, though, so you will need to budget for headphones or external replacements.

The keyboard will work fine for gamers, although typists may wish it were a little firmer with more travel. Below it is a good touch pad, which feels accurate and has responsive buttons.

Inside the chassis are a decent 80GB hard disk and a DVD writer, a big improvement over the £699 version. The larger hard disk is particularly useful as Evesham supplies this notebook with Windows Media Center Edition 2005, so you'll have enough space to store all your media files before accessing them through the excellent interface. You could even add a compatible TV tuner and turn your notebook into a Personal Video Recorder (PVR).

This is a good all-round notebook with lots of entertainment options. There's even a built-in webcam for video chat. The price is reasonable given the power of the 3D graphics chipset. It's ideal for casual gamers.

Author: Seth Barton