Evesham Axis Style review

Not everyone needs an enormous PC that will run the latest 3D games.

If you just want to surf the web and write letters, all that power and expense will be completely wasted. Evesham's Axis Style has been designed with this in mind - it's not that powerful, but it's small, quiet and doesn't cost the earth.

The Axis is built into a Shuttle style case that has roughly the same dimensions as a shoebox and is finished in matt black with a shiny black plastic fascia. It's not bad looking and it doesn't take up that much space.

Fine for everyday tasks

Sadly, performance isn't anything to write home about. The Axis Style will breeze through everyday tasks, but ask it to edit some video or play a game and it will grind to a halt. To be fair, it's not designed to be a power PC - it's meant as an inexpensive, stylish computer for undemanding users. And that would be fine, if the price reflected this. If you take a look at the computers in our PC group test, however, you'll see that you can get one for £599 that will storm through games and other demanding applications.

This PC would really have benefited from having an extra 512MB of RAM - particularly as 64MB of this is shared with the graphics card. And there are no speakers, which is rather stingy.

For such a small PC, the Axis offers fairly good upgrade opportunities. There's space for a second hard drive and there's a free SATA connector to plug it in to. The Sempron processor plugs into a socket 754 connector. Chips that fit into this connector will continue to be manufactured until the end of 2007, which means they should still be available for much of 2008. That gives you plenty of opportunity to upgrade the processor. There's also a free PCI-Express 16x slot into which you can fit one of the latest PCI-Express graphics cards. There's a normal PCI slot free too, and room for full-height cards, so you won't be limited in your choice of upgrade components. We tried it with the MSI NX7600GT card reviewed on page 48 and the 3D score increased from 5% to 79%, so there's scope for turning the Axis into a mini gaming PC.

The new card was difficult to fit though, as there's not much room in the case. Sadly, there are no free memory slots, so if you want to upgrade the RAM, you'll have to replace at least one of the installed memory modules. We were also a bit surprised to find only four USB ports.

On the bright side

The ViewSonic monitor did impress us. We reviewed it for the first time last month and it won a Recommended award. It's bright, its image quality is good, our test DVDs looked great, and it can be connected to both a standard VGA output and a DVI port. Because it's widescreen, the monitor is perfect for watching DVD movies on. The wireless Logitech mouse and keyboard were comfortable and gave us no problems.

This isn't a bad PC - it's not fast, but it's not meant to be. It does the job it's designed for - to provide undemanding users with an adequate PC that looks good and doesn't take up too much room. But the only advantage the Evesham has over the Dell that won our £599 group test is its much smaller size. When you consider all the extra power and upgrade potential offered by the Dell, however, the trade-off just doesn't seem worth it.