Mesh Matrix II 550BE Wins PC Advisor Best Buy Award!

The accolades keep rolling in for Mesh Computers at the moment, with the Mesh Matrix II 550BE winning the PC Advisor Best Buy Award. The Verdict was that "The Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA offers unbeatable value and class-leading performance. If you want a gaming PC for less than £500, nothing else here comes close."

See the full review from PC Advisor written by Paul Monckton below:

Systems at this price point always involve compromises - a meaty processor or a powerful graphics card will obliterate a £500 budget. But the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA not only achieves the highest WorldBench 6 real-world speed score of the group, it also provides staggering gaming performance that leaves the competition stuttering and flickering in its wake.

We were somewhat surprised to find an AMD CPU under the hood of our Best Buy machine, and the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA's 3.1GHz Phenom II X2 500 BE marks a turn-around for our previously Intel-dominated PC charts.

All the systems reviewed here feature ATI graphics cards, but the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA's HD 4870 outclasses the competition and takes gaming to a new level of performance.

Other components are standard fare, with the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA's smart black case concealing 4GB of DDR2 memory and a 500GB hard drive. The 19in display is perfectly acceptable but lacks a digital input. Usefully, Mesh preinstalls the CyberLink DVD suite.

One slight niggle, however, is the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA's one-year warranty, which is disappointing in comparison with the two-year guarantees offered elsewhere.

Verdict

The Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA offers unbeatable value and class-leading performance. If you want a gaming PC for less than £500, nothing else here comes close.

MESH Matrix II 5870XT wins PC Advisor Recommended award

Review time again, and this time its the MESH Matrix II 5870XT which has picked up a PC Advisor Recommended award. Featuring a ATI Radeon 5870 HD graphics card, and powered by AMD's flagship CPU, PC Advisor has lauded it as a supremely fast gaming PC costing less than £1,000.

No other sub-£1000 PC they've seen had come anywhere close to the MESH Matrix II 5870XT's level of gaming performance, with the Radeon 5870 HD propelling it to over 40fps on the HQ Crysis test - that's at least 10fps faster than the best of the rest.

Check out the full PC Advisor review by Paul Monckton below:

Fitted with the latest ATI Radeon 5870 HD graphics card and powered by AMD's flagship CPU, the MESH Matrix II 5870XT is a supremely fast gaming PC costing less than £1,000.

With the exception of nVidia's hugely expensive GeForce GTX 295, this new single-GPU graphics card stomps all over anything else on the market today, including AMD's former champ, the twin-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2.

No other sub-£1,000 system we've seen so far can come anywhere close to the MESH Matrix II 5870XT's level of gaming performance. The Radeon 5870 HD propels it to speeds of 40fps in our high-quality Crysis test - at least 10fps faster than the best of the rest can muster.

Furthermore, this is currently the only graphics card capable of forthcoming titles such as DiRT2 from Codemasters. These will push the 5870 still further ahead of the competition in both performance and image quality. You'll also be able to use Microsoft's DirectCompute 11 API, allowing the graphics card to take on other duties more effectively, such as seamlessly converting video for use on your portable media player. Older cards are limited to DirectCompute 10.0 or 10.1.

See also: HIS Radeon HD 5870 1GB review

A total of four monitor outputs include a pair of DVI ports as well as both HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, all of which (thanks to AMD's ‘Eyefinity' feature) can be used simultaneously to enable ultra-high resolution multi-screen gaming. However, our review MESH Matrix II 5870XT PC is supplied with a single 22in Iiyama full-HD monitor (for £50 more you can get the 24in monitor pictured).

Housed in a black brushed-aluminium NZXT Hush system case, the MESH Matrix II 5870XT PC remains quiet. This is thanks to a sound-insulated interior which dampens the soft whirr of the specially selected cooling fans inside.

The Asus M4A79XA EVO mainboard comes with two x16 PCI-Express slots supporting an upgrade to dual graphics cards using CrossFireX. Two sticks of DDR3 RAM provide a total of 4GB - with a pair of empty slots of upgrades.

Our WorldBench result of 126 points reveals general application performance to sit at the lower end of what we'd expect from a similarly priced PC based on Intel's Core i7 920, so while the MESH Matrix II 5870XT offers exceptional value for gamers, those hungry for the ultimate overall performance may wish to spend a little more for a faster processor.

Verdict

The MESH Matrix II 5870XT is powerful, well-constructed and built with quality components, but the Radeon 5870 HD takes it to a whole new level of gaming performance at an affordable price.

Mesh Elite Ice 7 wins PC Advisor Recommended Award

PC Advisor Magazine has awarded the Mesh Elite Ice 7 the PC Advisor Recommended Award. This £799 system was quoted as having "[The Mesh Elite Ice 7] is a good all-round PC system, featuring the Intel Core i7 920 processor at a new low price."

Here's an excerpt from the review

This PC system from Mesh represents a breakthrough specification at the price.

Priced at £749, the Mesh Elite Ice 7 is the first system we've seen at this price to include the Intel Core i7 processor, now reduced in price by Intel. Until now, to get one of Intel's quad-core i7 CPUs, system prices would be closer to £1,000.

The Mesh Elite Ice 7 is built around a Mesh-branded case, relatively solid and a step-up from some of the flimsier boxes we see in the Test Centre. On the silver-painted plastic front panel is a dual-layer DVD writer, and four different slots for various memory cards. Also here you'll find two USB plus a full-size FireWire 400 port.

An Asus P6T SE motherboard includes the usual raft of pre-configured ports, accessible from the rear panel, with interesting extras such as Toslink digital optical audio, another FireWire port, and even eSATA. Six RAM slots are populated by three 1GB cards, making future upgrades straightforward.

Other expansion possibilities include space for two more hard disks and three optical drives.

Aside from the two cooling fans built into the HEC 550W power supply, three more fans can be found: on the case rear panel, over the CPU and on the HIS-branded ATI HD 4850 graphics card. Overall, system noise was moderate.

Included in the package price is a 22in widescreen LCD monitor, the PCA Gold Award-winning Iiyama E2208HDS. Based on a 1920-1080 full-HD TN panel, it gives not the most colourful of images, but instead errs toward the neutral side. Combine that with its matt anti-glare finish, and you should find it to be more relaxing for long-term use than any shiny screen or one that over-saturates colour.

For the full review, please see PC Advisor's site, then head over to our site to see the Mesh Elite Ice 7