Product Reviews

Shout it from the rooftops: AMD has just released its fastest chip ever! But with the Intel's Pentium 4 processors getting cheaper by the day, it's no easy task for a system builder to put together a top-class PC using the Athlon XP 3200+, and still offer the value for which the Athlon is famous. Nevertheless, Mesh has taken up the challenge with its Matrix 3200+ Flex, a PC that bristles with the latest technology.

The processor at the heart of this PC, the Athlon XP 3200+, offers a number improvements over previous chips. Its total cache has been boosted to a whopping 640 kilobytes, and its front-side bus speed increased from 333MHz to 400MHz. But what does that mean? Well, cache is super-fast memory that's built into the processor. It's used to store any data that the processor is likely to need in the near future. This is handy, because it's much quicker to get things from the cache than from the PC's main memory. The more data that can be stored in the cache, the less time the processor has to hang around waiting for it to arrive. And the front-side bus? That's the channel through which the processor communicates with the rest of the system. The faster it runs, the quicker data can travel from the processor to the rest of the PC. For a long time the Athlon's front-side bus languished at 266MHz, while the Pentium 4's was cranked up first to 400MHz, then to 533MHz and finally to 800MHz. The Athlon XP 3000+ was the first Athlon to try to narrow this gap with its new 333MHz front-side bus. The 3200+ goes one better, upping it to 400MHz.

But the processor isn't the only thing that determines a PC's performance. Team a fast processor up with a slow graphics card or memory, and your system will run like a three-legged nag trying to hold in a fart. Fortunately, the Matrix doesn't suffer from this problem. Its graphics card is built on nVidia's latest and most powerful graphics chip, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. It even has a whopping 256MB of memory on board - which is more than most PCs had a year ago! The card's FX 5900 graphics chip runs at 450MHz, and

ADVERTISEMENT

has a memory bandwidth of 27.2GB/s - more than double the bandwidth of nVidia's next-fastest card, and almost three times that of its previous top performer, the GeForce 4 Ti 4600. This is important, because the speed at which data can be transferred from the graphics processor to the graphics card's memory is one of the major constraints on graphics card performance. As if that weren't enough, Mesh has used 400MHz DDR RAM - the fastest available - for the PC's main memory, to support the PC's core components.

With components such as these, it's no surprise to see the Mesh score an impressive 16,539 in our 3DMark 2001 games test. This is an absolutely stonking score, and it means this machine will handle any game you care to install on it. It's not quite as fast as the identically priced Dell Dimension 8300 we reviewed last month, though. Despite its improvements, the new Athlon just isn't as fast as a 3GHz Pentium 4 - although there's not much in it.

Speed isn't all this system has going for it. It also has some fantastic features. For starters, there's the Audigy 2 sound card - the most sophisticated sound card Creative Labs makes. With the system's 6.1 surround sound speakers, the result is clear, crisp audio.

Mesh has also thrown in a Sony DVD writer, which can write both DVD+ and DVD- formats. This is good news, because manufacturers haven't yet agreed on a standard. Buy this PC, and you'll be OK whichever format wins.

And if you want to add even more gizmos to this system, you're in luck. It has one DIMM slot free to accept extra RAM, and two free PCI slots for handy extras such as a TV tuner card or ADSL modem. You also get no fewer than six fast USB 2 ports. One drive bay is free, so you can install an extra CD drive, should you need one.

Of course, speed and features are no good if your new PC isn't comfortable to use. Fortunately, the Mesh Matrix is. The Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 930SB monitor is the old-fashioned CRT style, rather than a slim flat panel - but it has a whopping 19in screen! Its focus is good, and power regulation is decent. It suffers no noticeable misconvergence (where the red, green and blue dots that make the picture don't line up properly). The mouse and keyboard, both made by Logitech, are comfortable and accurate. The keyboard has plenty of useful feature buttons without looking too crowded.

This smashing PC easily deserves its Recommended Award - but it's not quite as fast as the Dell Dimension 8300 in our Top 50 (see page 180). The Mesh's features are just as good, but no better, than those of the Dell. As a result the Matrix just misses out on a coveted Best Buy award.