Evesham is performing a pretty little dance along technology's cutting edge with its latest machines. Not only are they shipping with the latest spin of Intel's Centrino laptop chipset, but they're also packing the newest mobile graphics from Nvidia, offering support for DirectX 10.
The fact that this is a fourth-generation Centrino machine is interesting enough, though. It boasts an updated wireless module that now supports 802.11n as well as previous generation standards.
This chipset also supports for 800MHz front side bus under full load, although because it's a power-conscious chipset, it can dynamically change the speed of the bus to save power. Another power-saving feature is Turbo Memory (previously codenamed Robson), which uses NAND flash memory to cache small items and ease the load on the hard drive.
The latest rendition of Centrino hasn't ushered in a new slew of processors, but Intel is at the top of its game at the moment, and this Core 2 Duo T7500 is an impressive sliver of silicon.
Clocked at 2.2GHz and packing 2MB of L2 cache per core, this will handle even the most demanding of tasks without breaking into a sweat. Evesham has married this to 2GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, which is plenty, although Vista is a hungry OS on the RAM front.
Punchy graphics
It's a great collection of core components, but this isn't all that this machine has to offer. Powering the glossy 17-inch screen is Nvidia's first DirectX 10 mobile graphics engine, the GeForce 8600M GT.
This is an impressive chip in mobile terms, and managed a score of 2,012 in 3DMark06 (for comparison, Intel's new mobile graphics core, the GMA X3100, scores around 400).
So, is this a machine worth paying just over a grand for? If you're partial to the odd game and need that amount of power while out and about, then it's an unquestionable yes.
However, there is one downside: the six-cell battery means you'll only see just over two hours worth of screen time when on that road.
