Product Reviews

It's nice of Mesh to leave you £51 change from your two grand, which you could put towards a bigger desk. This machine has a lot to live up to besides its huge bulk and matching price: a name that throws down the gauntlet, an impressive core specification, and a full set of peripherals thrown in. The cost is hardly surprising when it includes components like nVidia's brand new GTX 280 graphics card, which costs over £400 on its own.

As we expected from such a powerful graphics processor, the Ultimate achieved stunning benchmark results. In our most demanding Call of Duty 2 gaming benchmark, it scored 491%, which doesn't fit on our graph. It's more than twice as quick as most of the PCs we see in the Buyer labs. Needless to say, you'll be able to play all the very latest games without having to compromise in any way on quality settings, and it should stave off the day when a new title finally defeats your system.

The Mesh also provided great results in our 2D (general) benchmarks thanks to an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor. It's one of the most expensive and powerful in the range, and has four cores that each run at 2.66GHz. Unlike the graphics card, you can find this chip in more affordable PCs too, but a score of 247% is more than enough to cope with the most demanding of tasks.

The rest of the specification is also excellent. There's a Blu-ray drive for watching the latest high definition films, and the monitor is not only a gigantic 28 inches across but also has the HDMI socket required to get the

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maximum quality from commercial movie discs. The huge 1TB (1000GB) hard disk also gives you room to build up a collection of HD movies acquired by other means, along with all the music tracks you can eat. Installing applications and games will barely make a dent.

The PC's chassis is another high point - quite literally. The Cooler Master Cosmos is one of the biggest cases we've ever seen, towering even above the massive screen. In return for sacrificing a substantial part of your room, you get a host of helpful features that keep the Ultimate cool and quiet. A sturdy door protects the optical drives and expansion bays, and there are four USB ports - as well as a padded area for storing small peripherals - on what we can't help calling the roof. There's a good selection at the back, too, with six more USB ports and a pair of Ethernet sockets, eSATA - for connecting external hard disks at top speed - and plenty of audio jacks.

Cool runnings

And there's more inside. The processor's heatsink stretches all the way across the chassis to keep the four cores chilled, and a large plastic tunnel directs heat from the graphics card out of the case. There's room for extra graphics cards as well as disks, and all the bays are equipped with a tool-less entry mechanism to make upgrading easy.

It's when you move away from this brilliant base unit that the Ultimate doesn't quite live up to its name. The monitor may be the size of Wales, but it's afflicted with poor backlighting that bleeds through from each side and lends the top and bottom an odd purplish hue. We'd rather have a better quality 24 inch panel (Mesh would no doubt oblige on request). The speakers aren't the best, either. There's nothing much wrong with Logitech's S220 2.1 set, but if you're shelling out for a system like this you'll want a serious 5.1 surround setup. Any sensible buyer will be eBaying the Logitechs and heading down to Richer Sounds.

It was niggles like these that prevented us getting completely overexcited about the Mesh.At its heart is a stunning PC, but for us, 'Ultimate' should mean no compromises.