Evesham Oxegen SX7000 review

Back when Computer Buyer started out, 200 whole issues ago, £1249 would have been an appealingly low price tag for a complete PC.

Nowadays, our first thought on encountering any system that costs over a grand is to wonder how the expense can be justified.

The Evesham Oxegen SX7000 set about allaying our doubts from the word go, oozing professional quality as soon as we took it out of the box. The sturdy Cooler Master case is pleasing to the eye and offers a plethora of ports at front and back. The 22 inch ViewSonic VX2235wm monitor presents a huge desktop in rich, bright colour, with generous viewing angles, so you don't need to be precisely square-on to appreciate it.

We were also taken by the Microsoft Wireless Comfort Keyboard, a luxurious model that's a joy to type on thanks to the swish padded wrist-rest and 'comfort curve' design. It's coupled with a Wireless Optical Mouse that's responsive and nice to hold, though where the keyboard is festooned with custom keys and controls, the mouse offers only the basic two buttons and scroll wheel.

After such a wealth of goodies, we were slightly disappointed to see Evesham had chosen to bundle Creative T7900 7.1 speakers. You can customise the system when you order, but these are the default, and while there's nothing exactly wrong with these units, they lack the punch to fill a room with hi-fi sound. We were also faintly perplexed by the decision to include both a DVD writer and a DVD-ROM drive - handy if you need to copy directly from one disc to another, but that won't work with commercial DVDs and we've never found the need for any other purpose. A memory card reader would have been a more useful addition.

Still, when it comes to core components the SX7000 reasserts its premium credentials. The heart of the system is an extremely powerful Intel Core 2 Quad processor, backed up by a decent 2GB of RAM and a fast 500GB Western Digital hard disk. This mighty combination proved its power with a general (2D) benchmark result of 203% - enough to eat weighty graphics and video tasks for breakfast.

And if you think that's good, wait till you try it in 3D: a pair of nVidia 8600 GTS graphics cards, configured to work in parallel, stomped their way to a 3D test score of 225%. In practice, this means you'll be able to fill that huge screen with 3D action.

Between two stools

So does the Oxegen SX7000 actually represent good value? Yes and no. It's certainly a premium PC that's in a different league to cut-price rivals in terms of feel and performance. But who's it aimed at? For everyday users of productivity software, it's clearly excessive: you can romp through your home office tasks and the odd game on a computer half this price. Top-end gamers, meanwhile, may consider it not powerful enough, at least in the graphics department: the 8600 GTS is three steps down from the top of the nVidia range, and we've found in our tests that even two of them joined together can't keep up with anything from the 8800 series.

The bottom line is that Evesham has assembled a collection of fine components at a fair price, but the sum of the parts isn't clearly one thing or another. If you're looking to spend this sort of money on a PC, the SX7000 won't waste any of it, but you'll need to think about whether it's spent in the right places.