Product Reviews

At Computer Buyer we're obsessed with value for money. For this reason, we're always keen to put cheap PCs through their paces. Just what can you get for £499? 'More than enough to get by', is the usual answer. But not everyone watches the pennies and worries about the pounds. Some people aren't afraid of spending money.

If you do stretch the budget, you can - unsurprisingly - buy a PC that's far more luxurious than a frugal five-hundred-pound system. We reckon you should be able get the system of your dreams for around £1,300. Shelling out more than £1,300 is of dubious benefit, we reckon. We don't mind spending, but remember: we're still averse to overspending.

Spend more and you can expect a very fast processor, 128Mb of RAM, a large, fast hard disk and a stonking graphics card. All these are true of the Mesh Matrix 600F.

Speed isn't everything though, so all the PC's peripherals should be a cut above the budget hoi polloi. A more luxurious system should have a tasty monitor with a crisp picture and a big screen. And there should be plenty more to shout about, those extra little luxury items to remind you that this is a quality machine.

The processor in question is a 600MHz Athlon from AMD. While Intel's top chip runs at a similar speed, our tests have so far indicated that the Athlon is actually considerably faster.

IBM supplies the hard drive used in this PC, an UltraATA 66 18Gb model. Impressive, when you consider that 12 months ago 10Gb would have been an eye-opening figure. Graphics duties are performed by a Matrox G400. This model isn't quite as fast as the G400Max, our present top graphics card, and lacks its dual monitor output. It does have 32Mb RAM though, and is a very tasty performer.

On the multimedia front, Mesh opted for the Sound Blaster Live! Value. With good reason too. In our July sound card round-up, Creative scooped a Recommended award with this card. In essence, the Live! Value is a cut-down version of the Live! card. The latter is aimed squarely at serious musicians, but to make a budget version, Creative simply removed some fancy digital connectors. The Value model still supports four speakers for genuine surround sound, though. This is a real bonus if you're into highly atmospheric games like Half-Life and Unreal, and thankfully Mesh thought to include a four-speaker set, the Creative Labs PCWorks FPS-1000.

Last month, in our 'Hollywood at Home' feature, we explored how DVD makes it possible to watch movies on your PC. It was pretty exciting stuff - especially when paired with a powerful PC - so we're glad to see the Mesh fitted with a DVD drive. With so many software companies mooting DVD releases soon, a straight CD-ROM drive would have been disappointing. Even more important is a fast modem - sure enough, the internal version of our Top 50 winner, the Diamond SupraExpress 56K, was sitting in a PCI slot.

Less obligatory, but just as welcome is the internal Zip drive. The Zip's popularity is testament to its practicality. It can store 100Mb of data quickly on a cheap and rugged disk, which more and more PC owners can read.

Switching the PC on, we found a copy

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of WordPerfect Office 2000 installed. We reviewed this suite last month. It's not quite up to the quality of SmartSuite or Office SBE, but it does offer considerably more applications than the latter and better speech recognition than the former, so it's pretty good value. Besides, it's refreshing to think that not everyone needs to use Lotus or Microsoft.

Mesh's Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 710 monitor is an aperture grille display, with an exceptionally flat and square tube. Aperture grille technology produces rich colours and crisp text, and this screen is a good example.

Mesh sent the Matrix 600F to us with a Web Cruiser mouse. It has a scroll wheel, but it's pretty loathsome to use, feeling very plasticky and rather uncomfortable in the hand.

The Mesh arrived in a mini-tower case, which always makes working inside your PC easier than with a desktop-shaped system. Internal layout and cabling was very tidy, with the usual bird's nest of wires and cables tamed with neat clips. Its Microstar motherboard has five PCI and two ISA slots. Two of the PCI slots are filled with the sound card and modem respectively. There's also space for two more DIMMs which, if you've the cash, could yield a maximum 768Mb of RAM!

The Matrix has oodles of expansion bays, too. You can fit two 3.5in devices, one internally and another that opens at the front. There's also space for a further 5.25in drive too. If you fancy a CD-R/W, for example, fitting it should be easy as pie.

Upgrading this system should be a doddle, as you've got plenty of space to work in. However, the extent to which you'll be able to upgrade the processor is hard to judge. Certainly, the motherboard manuals for Athlon-based machines don't guarantee much. The Microstar MS-6167 motherboard manual only promises to work with Athlons up to 600MHz. When AMD makes quicker Athlons available, they might work - or they might not. It all depends on Microstar's undisclosed degree of foresight.

However, our performance tests revealed that you probably won't need to upgrade the processor for quite some time. Overall, Mesh's Matrix was an out-and-out performance winner. Thanks mainly to its 600MHz Athlon, it's the fastest PC we've ever seen, displacing last month's Evesham Vale Athlon 600. The Matrix scored 2238 in our benchmark test, scoring a massively impressive 2459 in the Microsoft Word test. This demonstrates that the machine's motherboard and memory combination is working especially well. In our Excel trial the Mesh scores 2582, demonstrating that the Athlon is a fast number-cruncher too.

We also tested the machine using FutureMarks's 3DMark 99 Max tests. These gauge 3D performance, so the results depend heavily on the quality of graphics card as well as the power of the processor. Essentially the processor deals with the 'plot' of a 3D game: who's where and what they're doing. The graphics card then works out what this should look like, applying textures and colours to the scene description maintained by the processor to create the lush 3D worlds we're used to seeing. With a 3D Mark benchmark score of 5936, the Mesh is also the quickest machine for 3D.

Using 2D applications, Mesh's benchmark score is 15 per cent faster than the fastest Intel-based machines. This is perceptible now, and will become more important as software becomes more complex and demanding.

Mesh has come up trumps with its Matrix. It's the fastest machine we've ever seen, and packed with excellent components. Its Mitsubishi monitor is highly commendable, and its Creative speakers a real boon for gamers.

Have we found the perfect machine? The Mesh is very close, the only bit we really didn't like was the mouse. The Matrix wins our coveted Top Fifty award.