Verdict: A smaller SLI laptop
In almost every way you look at it, manufacturers of desktop replacements have pretty hard lives. They might own nice houses and various other nice things, but that's small compensation for the fact that many of the people they want to impress -hardcore gamers and PC enthusiasts - tend to double over laughing at each new product they deliver. Let's look at the facts: virtually every desktop replacement laptop we've seen has been hot-running, uncomfortable to use and incapable of delivering the bangs per buck of a similarly priced desktop.
We approached Evesham's Quest Nemesis fairly cautiously, not least on account of the name. There's no denying that it's big - 39.5cm wide and a shade under 30cm deep makes it pretty unappealing in terms of portability, but Evesham is selling this machine as a PC that you can take to a LAN party without needing a mile's worth of cabling and a separate keyboard and monitor as well.
The most obvious compromise is the CPU. While machines such as the Alienware Aurora m7700 have Athlon 64 FX-60s, the Nemesis has a single-core AMD Turion 64 ML-44. Although the chip's 2.4GHz clock speed sounds promising, it has only half the Level 1 cache of the FX-60, and it has only a single core.
The good news is that the ML-44 has a TDP of only 35W. Whether or not you care about noise and heat output, the important thing to remember is that a low power consumption by the CPU means that more power is available to other components.
In this case, the most important of those other components is the graphics setup. Twin Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS GPUs make this an obscenely powerful laptop. Both GPUs have 256MB of memory, and both are on MXM cards. As well as making the Nemesis easier to build, this is potentially exciting news for incurable tweakers, as you could, theoretically at least, remove both of the cards and replace them with whatever cards comes next.
In practice, though, the news is a little duller. MXM cards are, unless you happen to be a very large company, next to impossible to get hold of. What's more, replacing a laptop part with a component that will potentially run hotter is simply asking for trouble - even off-the-shelf chassis such as the Nemesis are designed with very tight thermal arrangements.
The core logic chipset at the heart of the Nemesis is Nvidia's nForce4 SLI, which is good news for Nvidia fans. Again, overclockers excited at the prospect of running nTune on a laptop will be disappointed; we tried Nvidia's overclocking software, and were rewarded with an instantaneous crash. The good news is that a few of nForce4 SLI's more useful features have made the transition to this laptop. You still get Gigabit Ethernet and, more importantly, Nvidia's MediaShield RAID technology is included too. There are two 80GB 7,200rpm Hitachi hard disks in the Nemesis, each connected to MediaShield and arranged in a RAID 0 array, although if you prefer something else then you can specify it when you order.
The 160GB capacity is useful when you consider that the Nemesis ships with Windows Media Center 2005, although the software is a little hamstrung by the lack of a remote control, and a lot more by the lack of a TV tuner. You can always add one by using one of the USB ports or, if you're feeling a little more adventurous, via the vacant mini-PCI port under the keyboard. There's already a coaxial socket on the back of the laptop, so it's not an insurmountable job.
Replacing the screen would be impossible, however, so it's good to see that Evesham has used a decent 17in widescreen TFT. The relatively constrained size means the Nemesis will fit in most bags, while the comparatively low resolution of 1,440 x 900 means that there's a fair amount of headroom for the incoming generation of 3D games. Our only complaint about the TFT is that the contrast range isn't very good; it's fine for most tasks, particularly games, but it loses detail in light and dark areas of the screen. Colour reproduction is better, though, and our test photos were convincing.
Evesham has made a decent attempt at making the Nemesis look good, but it's not a machine that you'd want to use on your lap. It's too big and, at 4.27kg, it's also much too heavy. It isn't much use on the road either. If you continue playing games in the event of a power cut, you can expect just an hour of use, which is hardly anything to get excited about.
The keyboard is perhaps recessed a little too far towards the back of the unit ,and we're not fans of the single-button trackpad (though there are two physical switches beneath it). The keyboard is solid, though, and also has a proper number pad beside it. The 1.3 megapixel webcam is more of a gimmick than a useful accessory, while memory card readers can handle SD, Compact Flash and Memory Sticks.
PERFORMANCE
The Nemesis shot through our tests. It managed to deliver a minimum frame rate of 25fps in Need for Speed: Most Wanted at 1,440 x 900, but only after we removed anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and one notch each from the world detail level and reflection settings. However, the average frame rate of 47fps is more than respectable.
F.E.A.R., again at 1,440 x 900, with everything set to maximum, and 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering, averaged 62fps, so the Nemesis had little problems with the game's set-piece firefights with numerous bad guys. Quake 4, at the same settings, managed an average of 50fps. These scores compare reasonably well with those of the Rock Xtreme CTX; at 1,400 x 1,050, the Rock averaged 43fps in NFS, although its Radeon X1800XT GPU could cope better with low levels of AA and AF.
The only problem with the Nemesis is one that will be familiar to readers of our SLI coverage - yes, it all comes down to the drivers. They were nowhere near ready. A fascinating and varied series of graphical glitches showed up in all of our demos, and the only way to fix them was to downscale the resolution to 800 x 600, which makes a mockery of having such plentiful power.
You might not need a super-fast dual-core CPU for all-night online gaming sessions, but if you intend to get on with some serious work or play a strategy game, you'll need something with a little more oomph than the ML-44. Our application benchmarks came back with an underwhelming result of 0.94, well behind the 1.16 the Core Duo-equipped Rock Xtreme CTX could muster.
CONCLUSION
A desktop replacement laptop is a fantastically difficult thing to get right and the Nemesis doesn't quite succeed. Its 3D performance is good, and Evesham has done a better job of matching the screen resolution and GPU than Rock has done with the CTX. While the Rock CTX's Radeon X1800XT is more powerful, using two mid-range GPUs such as the GeForce 7900 GS means the Nemesis could be faster in games that support SLI.
However, the fact that the CTX is a dual-core machine, and uses one GPU, which always provides fewer headaches than SLI, means that, ultimately, it remains a more attractive choice than the Nemesis.
