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Evesham hasn’t taken the overclocking route favoured by rivals such as Scan and Chillblast, but its choice of a Core 2 Duo E6700 running at 2.67GHz ensures that the Solar Plus provides excellent performance at a competitive price.
Backed up by an Nvidia Geforce 7900 GT graphics card, the Solar Plus performed well in all our benchmark tests and even came within a whisker of matching the 3D performance of the overclocked Scan 3XS C2D-OC in our Far Cry test. The Solar Plus also costs £100 less than the Scan machine, so it’s clearly easier on the wallet, yet comparably fast.
The only omission that might deter some more advanced users is that the Solar Plus doesn’t have a spare 16x PCI Express slot that you could use to install a second graphics card.
Despite this, the performance of the Solar Plus is still strong enough to make it an outstanding games machine with the horsepower to handle anything the average user can throw at it.
It’s also one of the few machines in this group to use the Media Center
Edition of Windows XP, so it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a PC to
use as your home-entertainment system.
There are also twin optical drives and a bundled copy of Roxio’s Easy Media
Creator, providing you with all the tools you need for creating your own CDs and
DVDs.
Ideally, we would have liked 2GB of Ram to maximise application performance, but at this price you can afford to buy another 1GB and still get a system for less than most of the other machines in this review.
We also like Evesham’s three-year warranty. The power of these Core 2 Duo machines means they’ll probably still be earning their keep years from now, so a decent warranty only adds to the Solar’s value for money.
This article is part of a group test of
£1,499 Conroe
PCs.
See also
Chillblast Hard
core 6600 OC
Mesh Elite E6600 PCW
PC Nextday Zoostorm 5-7402 Edge PC
Scan 3XS C2D-OC
Apple launches Xeon processor in Mac Pro
Core 2 Duo numbering system
Performance graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downloads
All Desktops
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