Evesham Mini PC review

There's not much room for recording programmes as it is, as the Mini PC only ships with a 40GB hard drive. This is a paltry amount of space for any computer, let alone an MCE machine. The disk is only big enough to store around 10 hours of high-quality video, so we recommend you buy the optional 100GB drive instead (for an extra £65).

If that's too much to swallow, the Mini PC's DVD-rewriter drive is an acceptable means of backing up data. The drive writes to DVD± (plus and minus) discs at 8x, DVD-RAM discs at 5x, and it's dual-layer compatible, so it'll write up to 8.5GB of data to compatible discs.

As mentioned, there's only a pair of USB ports available. Once you've connected a mouse and keyboard (which aren't included in the package), there's nowhere to connect other peripherals except the FireWire port. Because of this, potential buyers should definitely invest in a USB hub.

The Mini PC doesn't have many video-output ports, so you'll need to make sure your chosen television or monitor has a DVI input port if you intend to get the best image quality. If this isn't a priority, you can use the S-Video port.

In trying to keep the standard package under £500, Evesham hasn't supplied much software, but there's a copy of Microsoft Works 8, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.

Performance
The Mini PC isn't built for speed, but its performance in common productivity applications is commendable. Its Centrino CPU is designed to run at fairly low clock speeds, but it'll happily run most applications at a decent lick, and only begins to struggle with more demanding tasks like video encoding.

The Mini PC isn't any good for playing modern games. It refused to start our Far Cry test, and struggled to run Doom 3 at 6fps. To its credit, it had no trouble outputting high-definition video to our 1,080p display.

One minor gripe was that the Mini PC could occasionally get very noisy when running processor-intensive applications, although Evesham says the fan on our review sample may have been slightly damaged during transit. At all other times, the noise emitted by the Mini PC is barely noticeable.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide