Product Reviews

The abiding fear that comes with any PC purchase is that today's latest and greatest system will swiftly find itself superseded and relocated to the scrap heap. When you're spending nigh on £1,000 on a PC, that fear is more than justified. When you're spending twice as much, its almost obligatory.

So, when we asked Mesh to build a high-performance, future-proof PC for less than £2,000, we really weren't too surprised when their proposed specification ate up almost every penny of the budget. What we weren't prepared for was quite how much they've managed to cram into the Extreme QX G80 CB.

Extreme Caution

With Windows Vista almost ready to be unleashed, now may not seem like the best time to buy a PC with Windows XP installed. However, just like the Eclipse PC reviewed on page 34, Mesh is offering a free upgrade to Windows Vista when it finally arrives. There's a nominal fee of £15 to cover costs, but this isn't unreasonable as you'll be getting Windows Vista Home Premium Edition rather than the cut down Basic Edition.

Until your Vista disc pops through your letterbox though, you'll have to make do with the still rather lovely Windows XP Media Centre 2005 that comes pre-installed. The budget didn't apparently stretch to a TV tuner nor the usual MCE remote control, so the Media Centre isn't much use as it stands, but add a digital TV tuner at a later date and you'll be able to exploit it. That said, this is a high-performance thoroughbred, not a whisper quiet PC for the living room, so you not everyone will mourn this omission.

Four heads are better than two

Dual-core processors are pretty commonplace at the moment and thanks to the low-cost, high-performance Intel Core 2 Duo range, you don't need a vast budget to get yourself a powerful PC. But while squeezing two processors into the space previously occupied by just one may be a technological marvel, it's just the beginning.

Both AMD and Intel are on a path to cram ever more processor cores onto a single chip and to that end, the QX G80 comes equipped with the very latest Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor. This has four processor cores, each running at 2.66GHz. In order to eke every last drop of performance from this chip, Mesh has also fitted 2GB of DDR2 memory and a nippy Seagate 320GB hard drive. As you'd expect from such a high specification, QX G80 tore through our benchmarks to record the fastest result we've ever seen - 230%. It even managed to beat the Hi-Grade quad-core PC we reviewed last month by a couple of percent!

Hidden treasure

While having four processing cores at your disposal sounds great on paper, the reality is that they will often be performing the PC equivalent of twiddling their thumbs for much of the time.

If you're really to exploit the power of a quad-core PC, you need software that is 'multi-processor aware' and so capable of sharing its workload across each core. For example, the image editing and audio

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encoding parts of our benchmarks aren't terribly suited to a multi-processor PC, and the QX G80's results for these two tests were only 50% faster than our benchmark PC.

The video encoding test, however, is multi-core aware and here, the QX G80 scored a gargantuan 509%. So, if you're using suitable applications (and video editing, particularly with HD video, is clearly one), this PC will make life much easier. Similarly, if you want to leave something taxing like video encoding or CD ripping churning away in the background while you play an equally demanding game, this is one of the few PCs that will let you do it with ease. There is no application currently available that can reach the limits of the QX G80's power and once Vista arrives, you can expect more and more applications and games to start taking full advantage of those processor cores.

Gaming revolution

So there's a quad-core processor, plenty memory and a free upgrade to Windows Vista. So far, the Extreme QX is looking very tempting indeed, but it has yet another future-proof trick up its sleeve in the shape of the nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card. The 8800 series is nVidia's brand new range of graphics cards and we've reviewed two new models on page 37. The 8800 GTX inside the Mesh is the top-of-the-range card and with 768MB of its own DDR3 memory at its disposal, you'd expect awesome performance as standard.

The good news is that it certainly doesn't disappoint and it scored 291%. in our taxing Call of Duty 2 3D benchmark. Even with the resolution upped to 1680 x 1050 and the detail settings on maximum - settings that would bring any other graphics card to its knees - the 8800 GTX still managed a more than respectable score of 142%.

Performance is only half the story, though. One of the principal benefits of the 8800 series cards is that they are the first to support Microsoft's DirectX 10, which will form part of Windows Vista. You can read more about the benefits of DirectX 10 on page 37, but in short, it will allow for more visually impressive 3D games than you've ever seen before. And even in the unlikely scenario that the 8800 should start to struggle with games, the Asus motherboard is nVidia SLI-equipped and ready for a second card.

Through the looking glass

With such a great graphics card under the hood, we were overjoyed to find a 22in Iiyama E2200WS TFT monitor to go with it. Its native resolution of 1680 x 1050 gives a very spacious Windows Desktop to work on and does full justice to DVD movies too. Colour reproduction isn't perfect though, and colours in some of our photos were left a little muted. Contrast was perhaps a little lacking too, but in everyday use you'll rarely find cause for complaint. However, viewing angles are the monitor's Achilles heel and moving away from head-on in any direction resulted in noticeable shifts in colour tone - a problem that's of particular concern for a large display that can be viewed by several people. A little more disappointing is the fact that while the GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card supports HDCP for displaying protected HD video, the monitor does not.

The Extreme QX G80 CB is by far the fastest PC we've ever seen, but it's got more than just brawn going for it. £1,999 buys you a PC that's obscenely powerful now, but still has bags of potential in reserve for some time to come. It'll cope effortlessly with Windows Vista, is ready for the latest DirectX 10 games and when you do finally reach the periphery of its abilities, it'll bear some serious upgrades too.