Product Reviews

Chip makers aren't the most imaginative of souls. As the months tick by, so Pentium 4 becomes 2GHz, 2.4GHz and then 2.6GHz. The quicker the chip, the higher the number. With the release of its latest Athlon XP chips - codenamed Barton - AMD has injected a bit of creative thinking into the game.

On paper, the fastest Barton chip, the Athlon XP 3000+, actually runs more slowly than AMD's previous front-runner, the 2800+ (a member of the previous, 'Thoroughbred' family of Athlons). Unlike Intel, which names its processors according to their clock speeds, AMD gives its processors 'performance ratings'. Under the rating scheme, an Athlon XP with a clock speed of 2GHz is given the rating 2400+, indicating it offers equivalent performance to a 2.4GHz chip in AMD's original Athlon line (if such a thing existed). The new chip's '3000+' rating suggests performance equivalent to a 3GHz chip. The truth, however, is a little more complicated.

You see, Athlon XP 3000+ has an actual clock speed of 2.167GHz - lower than that of the older Athlon XP 2800+, which runs at 2.25GHz. Despite this, AMD claims the new chip is faster. How? AMD says it's because the new Barton chip has 512K of fast cache memory - double that of the older chips - enabling it to line up data more quickly for processing. To put AMD's claims to the test, we decided to check out one of the first machines to use the new chip: the Mesh Matrix 3000 +NDX.

Internally, the Mesh looks surprisingly spartan. Underneath a petite (and quiet) processor fan sits the new Athlon. Working alongside it is 512MB of DDR333 memory. The machine is built around an Asus A7N8X motherboard, which uses nVidia's nForce 2 motherboard chipset, so Mesh has sensibly chosen to split its 512MB memory in half, fitting two 256MB sticks of memory into two of the board's four memory slots. This allows the nForce chipset to cleverly boost performance by grabbing necessary data from both memory modules at once.

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next weapon in Mesh's arsenal is a massive 120GB Maxtor hard disk. Manage to fill that, and you'd deserve a medal - or a much-needed lesson in computer housekeeping. The drive is a rapid performer, too. It connects to the motherboard and passes data across a UDMA-133 interface - the quickest currently available. The Maxtor includes a large data cache of 8MB. This acts as a reservoir for data that's already been retrieved from the disk, which the motherboard can draw on while the hard disk is busy hunting down more files. This ensures the smooth flow of data, and guards against the processor running out of data to work on.

And there's a further treat in store - a Sony DW-U10A DVD-R/W drive. Along with being a quick DVD player and CD-R/W drive, it also lets you write DVDs. What's more, like our current Top 50 champion, Sony's DRU-500A drive, it's a multiformat write. It lets you write DVD+R/W, DVD+R, DVD-R/W and DVD-R.

Gamers will be delighted by the Mesh's graphics card - a Connect 3D ATI Radeon 9700 with 128MB of RAM. Working together with the Athlon XP 3000+, the Mesh Matrix muscles its way to a jaw-dropping score of 14,479 in our 3D graphics test, 3DMark 2001. It's no slouch when it comes to 2D work either, scoring 1,384. This is a seriously powerful PC.

Then we come to the monitor. Sadly, the Mesh's Mitsubishi 19in DiamondPro 930 is ugly. Looking like a relic of cold-war Soviet Russia, it's a hymn to the right angle, forswearing curves at every turn. Once you begin working with it, though, you'll be impressed. Its image is brilliantly crisp, sharp and stable.

Topping off the package are some fantastic extras. First among these is a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 - the latest and greatest of Creative Labs' Sounnd Blaster range. Teamed with this is a set of Sound Blaster Inspire 5700 5.1 surround-sound speakers. An excellent choice for gaming, movies and music.

Except for the monitor, which looks like it comes from The Land Design Forgot, the Mesh Matrix XP 3000 +NDX is a stunning machine. Any queries we had over the performance of the Mesh's Athlon XP 3000+ were silenced when we compared the Mesh's 2D score against that of the Polar, which contains a 2800+ processor. The Mesh scores 1,384, a healthy 133 points clear of the Polar - showing that the extra 256K of cache really does make a difference.

The Mesh's jaw-dropping performance, coupled with excellent features and a surprisingly low price, lead us to only one conclusion. If it's power you're after, buy a Mesh Matrix 3000 +NDX.