Building a PC can be a bit of a hassle if you’re a casual gamer. Spending the time, money and effort it takes to build a decent rig, may not appeal. Trouble is you still want a machine you’re not ashamed to take to a LAN.

Evetech’s custom pre-built gaming PC ­offers an alternative for R6500 (incl VAT). For this you get an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66 GHz CPU, a NVIDIA 9800GT 1GB DDR3 Graphic Card, a Seagate 320 GB hard drive, a Gigabyte S-series motherboard and 2 GB of RAM. All this in a snazzy black Isonic case with silver façade. If this isn’t good enough you can simply ­customise the rig further via Evetech’s easy-to-use website.

When testing the base model, we decided to really push the system and go overboard with the tests and were surprised at its stability and performance. Even when cranking up the settings on games like Crysis and Supreme Commander, renowned for their ability to stress a system\\\'s performance, the result was a playable game that didn’t become a slide show. Running Hyper PI to test the overall system stability came back with good results too, i.e. there were no crashes. 

Over clocking the system also proved successful as we managed to up the CPU speed to 3.2 GHz from 2.66 GHz. We could have gone further, but without sufficient cooling it became too great a risk. The CPU comes with the stock heat sink fan unit and not a 3rd party cooler.

Two gripes we did have are the fact that it doesn’t come with an OS (we used Windows 7), and the longevity of the machine is a little limited. By longevity we mean that while it copes with high-performance games currently on the market, it probably won’t in a year’s time. This is nothing a GPU upgrade couldn’t resolve though. Available from www.evetech.co.za or on 012-326-6547.