Mesh Computers win PC Adisor Best Buy Award

Mesh Computers have picked up another award, this time in February's issue of PC Advisor, with the Mesh Ice7 5870HD winning the PC Advisor Best Buy award. This £1299 (inc VAT) system features an Intel Core i7 860 CPU paired with a Radeon 5870HD GPU giving full Directx 11 compliance, winning Mesh a full 4.5 stars out of 5.

"Compared to the competition, the 2.8GHz clock speed of the Mesh Ice7 5870 HD's Intel Core i7 860 CPU seems rather pedestrian. But this quad-core chip is easily fast enough for most users and brings several cost-saving advantages to the table."

Check out PC Advisor's full review written by Paul Monckton below, which can also be found on PC Advisor's site.

Compared to the competition, the 2.8GHz clock speed of the Mesh Ice7 5870 HD's Intel Core i7 860 CPU seems rather pedestrian. But this quad-core chip is easily fast enough for most users and brings several cost-saving advantages to the table, including the ability to use a less expensive motherboard and install memory in pairs rather than threes. Mesh therefore saves money by supplying 4GB of DDR3 RAM rather than the 6GB seen elsewhere.

As a result, there's cash left in the budget to spend elsewhere on the Mesh Ice7 5870 HD's specification. The first area Mesh has put this to good use is graphics, and the Radeon HD 5870 is a formidable DirectX 11.0 card. It delivers excellent performance in our demanding games tests and gives intensive tasks such as video encoding a processing boost.

Also included is a 1.5 terabyte (TB) hard drive and a 64GB solid-state drive (SSD). The SSD significantly improves the Mesh Ice7 5870 HD's startup times and application launches, but can quickly become full. We were unable to install Crysis, Fear and WorldBench 6 on the SSD simultaneously.

Mesh hasn't included speakers with the Ice7 5870 HD, but a Blu-ray drive and full-HD monitor offer the beginnings of an immersive multimedia experience. The display is the excellent Iiyama ProLite E2407HDSD, a 16:9 1920x1080 screen.

Verdict

Mesh’s Ice7 5870HD delivers a lot for your money, even if getting superb gaming performance and a Blu-ray drive means you must sacrifice a little raw speed. Note that the only other PC here to offer both is the Chillblast, which is £300 more expensive.

Mesh Computers win PC Advisor Best Buy Award with the Mesh Ice 7 DX11

Mesh Computers have won the PC Advisor Best Buy Award for the Mesh Ice DX11. Check out the full review below from PC Advisor, written by Paul Monckton

The Mesh Ice 7 DX11 Windows 7 desktop PC offers staggering gaming performance with an HD 5850 chip under its belt.


With the release of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards, we're seeing the first DirectX 11.0-capable PCs submitted to our Test Centre. It's no surprise that all four of the new PCs featured here include a 1GB Radeon HD 5850 card, including the Mesh Ice 7 DX11.

The strongest overall performance is delivered by the Mesh Ice 7 DX11. Despite its Intel Core i7 920 processor having now been discontinued, it's still widely available and offers great value for money. The performance of this chip is superb, propelling the Mesh to a WorldBench 6 speed score of 139 points.

A 6GB allocation of DDR3 RAM is provided, fitted into an Asus P6T SE motherboard. This is a good offering - the two machines based on Intel's newer Core i7 860 CPU come with only 4GB - yet the price of the Mesh Ice 7 DX11 remains reasonable.

Gaming performance is very good indeed, and the Mesh Ice 7 DX11's HD 5850 delivers a noticeable increase in performance over the HD 4890 found in older systems in this price category. It comes with support for DirectX 11.0, which is necessary for several forthcoming games as well as some new functions built into Windows 7.

A pair of 500GB hard drives are provided in a Raid 0 configuration. This setup offers enhanced performance over single-drive offerings, but it takes only one drive to fail in the Mesh Ice 7 DX11 for you to lose the data stored on both.

The Mesh Ice 7 DX11's 22in full-HD monitor delivers high-quality images. You don't get a Blu-ray drive, but this remains an excellent PC for both work and gaming.