Evesham Axis Dominator 76GT review

If you've ever dreamed of getting your mitts on a powerful, top-quality gaming PC for under £1,000, then this is your lucky month.

We've got two that both employ nVidia's latest high performance graphics card, the GeForce 7600GT. But there's much more to a great gaming PC than just a fast graphics card and Evesham's Axis Dominator is hoping to get the balance just right.

Despite having a slightly kinky name, the Axis Dominator really doesn't look that remarkable and if anything, it looks quite ordinary. It's a different story on the inside though, and the Dominator's unassuming looks hide an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM and a 200GB hard disk. None of these components are top of the range, but they're still sensible choices that earn the Evesham a solid score in our benchmarks. However, considering that the Axis Dominator costs the same as the Mesh X-Treme on page 28, it's disappointing to see that it doesn't use the same AMD processor and its hard disk is 50GB smaller.

Game on

The Evesham was no slouch in our 2D benchmarks, but when it came to 3D performance, it really showed its true colours. The nVidia GeForce 7600GT may not look like much, but thanks to its 256MB of memory, its score was within a whisker of the GeForce 7800T used by our benchmark PC. For a budget graphics card to perform at nearly the same level as a model that retails for over £200 is hugely impressive, but it also makes upgrading easy too. The MSI motherboard supports nVidia's dual-graphics card technology, SLI, which means you can add a second 7600GT in the future for even better 3D performance.

The monitor supplied with the Evesham is a ViewSonic 19in widescreen model - exactly the same as the one supplied with the Mesh X-Treme across the page. This is no bad thing, however, as the ViewSonic VA1912w (reviewed on page 38) is right at home with a gaming PC. The widescreen ratio makes it perfect for watching DVDs and playing widescreen-enabled games, while the 8ms response time means that even the most frenetic of shoot-outs were crisply and clearly rendered. There was a little ghosting in really fast moving scenes, but most people won't notice. The wide native resolution of 1440 x 900 gives a spacious Windows Desktop too, which makes editing multiple documents or photos easier than on a traditional monitor.

Different strokes

There aren't too many differences between the Evesham and Mesh's 7600GT-powered PC, but one that's in the Evesham's favour is its speakers. The Creative T3220s are only 2.1 speakers, but they are a substantially neater solution than surround speakers. For music, movies and games without cables trailing across the room, stereo speakers are a worthy compromise and the 3220's fare far better than the Mesh's T6060's with more delicate music and film soundtracks.

Another key difference between the two systems is Evesham's decision to use Windows Media Center Edition. Add a TV tuner and an MCE remote, and you can transform the Evesham into an entertainment PC that can receive and record TV programs. Even straight out of the box the Media Center software makes playing DVDs and browsing your PC for music, video and image files a doddle.

Evesham has put together a powerful gaming PC at a reasonable price, but so has Mesh. Mesh's PC has a nearly identical specification albeit with 50GB more hard disk space, a faster processor - and better performance across the board.