Product Reviews

For its latest gaming PC, Mesh has used the brand new AMD FX-60 processor. This beast of a gaming chip has two cores - so you're basically getting a pair of 2.6GHz processors throbbing away inside your computer. As if this weren't enough, the X-Treme also comes with not one, but two of nVidia's mighty GeForce 7800GT graphics cards.

PRICEY, BUT WORTH IT

The ber-powerful FX-60 processor in this PC is squarely aimed at gamers and other ultra-demanding PC users who want every last amp of power they can squeeze from their computer. That's all well and good, but it takes more than a processor to make a good PC.

Fortunately, this super-chip has at its disposal a set of system components that are equally powerful. Mesh has installed 2GB of RAM, as well as a pair of hard disks: one 300GB drive for storing Windows and program files and a 200GB drive for files. It's a bit of an unusual arrangement, but 500GB of storage is very generous. There's a pair of optical drives as well but for this price, it's a bit disappointing that one is only a DVD-ROM drive.

The X-Treme FX60 didn't even pause for breath while running our 2D benchmarks. Its score of 185.57 is the fastest we've ever seen. Where this machine really excelled, however, was in our 3D gaming tests. Armed with two nVidia 7800GT graphics cards, as well as its monster processor, the X-Treme FX60 charged through our 3D benchmarks. Our standard Doom 3 gaming test ran at 153.5 frames per second (fps) - most machines we see run it at somewhere between 30fps and 60fps! Even at the maximum, widescreen, resolution of this system's Philips TFT monitor, our Doom 3 test still ran at 86.3fps.

Just to see what it could do, we tried the X-treme on some other, even more demanding games. Half-Life 2 ran at 1680x1050 at 110fps, while the high definition Lost Coast add-on ran at 66fps. Even Call of Duty

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2 at the highest settings at 1680x1050 and with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled, ran at an impressive 38fps! Whatever game you want to play, this system will slice through it.

EASY ON THE EYES, AND EARS

Mesh has gone all-out with Philips' 200W6CS 20in widescreen TFT. The monitor has a native resolution of 1680x1050. This allows you to view documents side by side and more importantly, is perfect for widescreen movies. Colours are reproduced accurately and images are crisp and clean.

We were worried when we saw that the 200W6CS only had a response time of 16ms - the very slowest response time we'd recommend for a gaming PC. In practice, however, all of the games we ran looked lovely - clean with no evidence of any blurring or ghosting. Crucially, for an entertainment PC, the Philips's viewing angles were good - you'll happily fit three or four people around the monitor. It also has a single USB port in its base, which will be handy for plugging in the base station for the Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse.

Creative's Inspire 7900 7.1 surround speakers are great for gaming and movie watching. Bass from the subwoofer is thumping and full-bodied, while treble is equally bombastic, but not that refined. You wouldn't want to listen to classical music on these, but they're perfect for filling a room with sound.

The Creative X-Fi sound card has lots of special effects that not only make your games sound great, but also take work away from your processor, letting it get on with other jobs. It also has a special setting, called the 'crystalizer' that makes music sound clearer and cleaner. While this isn't much use on professional recordings, we found it made a real difference to low bit-rate MP3s. What a cracking audio setup.

Finally, when you spend this much money on a PC - you want to know that there's some help there if something goes wrong. Thankfully, you get Mesh's Premier warranty, which provides three years of on-site parts and labour warranty, so no matter what technical problems you should encounter, Mesh will visit to fix or replace parts.

BUYING DECISIONS

The X-treme is breathtakingly expensive, there's just no getting around the fact. But it's still good value - you couldn't get a system for any less that would do the FX60 justice. If you're a keen gamer and you want a PC that storms through current titles and will keep going for many years to come, this is it