Evesham Solar CR88 review

PCs equipped with the latest graphics cards and powerful quad-core processors tend to be very expensive, so we were surprised to find that Evesham's Solar CR88 costs less than £1,000.

The CR88 was impressively fast in our Windows benchmarks thanks to its Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. It excelled in our video-encoding test, with a stunning score of 453. This isn't surprising, since video-encoding software tends to be optimised for multi-core processors. It wasn't quite as fast in our other benchmarks, such as our image-editing test, since many other programs don't yet take advantage of the speed benefit provided by the extra cores.

Gamers will be pleased by the strong performance of the GeForce 8800GT graphics card. It coped easily with our graphically demanding Call of Duty 2 and Prey 3D tests. The CR88's motherboard supports SLI, so you could add a second graphics card for even faster performance in future, but we're not confident the 350W power supply would be able to cope with the extra demand.

The 22in widescreen display has a resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels, which gives you plenty of room for lots of palettes and windows in applications such as Photoshop. It's very bright, so is ideal for games and movies. It has a matte instead of a glossy finish so it won't reflect light if positioned near a window or under overhead lighting.

We were disappointed by the sound quality of the bundled Creative i-Trigue 3220 speakers. The satellites look sleek but are in constant danger of toppling over. Music sounded muddy and the bass was vague and distant. We'd advise upgrading to a better-sounding set of speakers such as Logitech's X-540 (Labs, Shopper 232). The PC comes with a wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse. The mouse feels unresponsive, and the keyboard's spongy keys are particularly unpleasant to type upon.

There's space for adding three extra hard disks if the spacious 500GB model isn't large enough for your storage needs. Unfortunately, no memory card reader is included so if you want to fit one internally it will occupy one of the empty hard disk bays. Thankfully, a second optical drive is provided, making it simple to copy discs.

Evesham's Solar CR88 is a good buy if you need a powerful PC for demanding Windows applications and playing the latest games. But unless you regularly use programs that have been optimised for a quad-core processor, Mesh's G92 Pulse Pro is the better buy. Its dual-core processor couldn't match the CR88 in our video-encoding benchmark, but it was faster in our image-editing and multitasking tests and almost matched the CR88's 3D performance. Better still, it costs £130 less.