Product Reviews

Two heads are better than one - that's the theory behind the powerful Crossfire graphics technology in Mesh's new Titan X1800 Fire system. Two ATI Crossfire graphics cards divide between them the difficult job of rendering complex 3D game graphics. This enables you to see the latest games in all their glory, at high resolution, with all their graphical effects turned up full - making them more exciting and immersive than ever before.

The Titan is expensive, but you get plenty of hardware for your money - a dual-core Athlon X2 4600+ processor, 1GB of RAM and a whopping 300GB hard disk. We were a little less impressed with the Philips 200P4 TFT monitor. It's big - 20 inches - but when we connected it using the analogue D-Sub cable supplied, the results were less than beautiful. The picture was hazy towards the edges and small text was fringed with colour. Swapping the analogue cable for a digital DVI lead (available for around a tenner) improved things, but small text could still be a bit of a strain. Overall, the monitor exhibited a slightly pink cast that we couldn't quite eliminate even after extended tweaking. Viewing angles are reasonable, but the further off-centre we got, the worse the colour problems. The monitor's contrast wasn't great either.

Inside the case

Inside the Titan's case, things are dominated by the two Crossfire graphics cards. Each card has a bulky heatsink and fan, and one of these prevents access to the motherboard's single PCI-Express slot. One PCI slot is similarly obscured and another is occupied

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by the system's Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card, leaving just one slot free for add-in cards.

Unlike nVidia's rival dual-graphics card system, SLI, the two graphics cards aren't connected inside the PC. Instead, the primary card of the pair - dubbed the 'Crossfire Edition' - is linked to the secondary ('Crossfire-ready') card with a short cable on the back of the PC's case. Each card renders part of a scene and the two portions are stitched together by the primary card. Exactly how the processing job is carved up depends on the game you're playing. The most efficient method is 'supertiling', in which the screen is divided up into 32 x 32-pixel tiles and tiles are allocated to each card. Two alternative rendering modes - alternate frames, and 'scissor mode' (where the screen is divided in two, and each card handles part) - allow cards to handle older games.

The Mesh flew through our graphics tests, notching up 65.5 frames per second (fps) in our standard Call of Duty 2 test; that's a massive 222% in our benchmarks. Even when we ran the game at the monitor's native resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels, it still ran at a playable frame rate of 35.3fps.

It's a stunning performance. Even so, £1,999 is a high price to pay. After all, part of the point of Crossfire is that it's a modular system. It enables you to start with one card and then add another when funds permit. What, we wondered, would the Mesh's performance be like if we tried it with a single card using ATI's even more powerful 1900XT graphics chip? Although it's still expensive, a single 1900XT card still works out around £150 cheaper than a pair of 1800s - and your second slot would be free, so you could stick in another X1900 when the card's price comes down a bit. What's more, the single card proved even faster than the Crossfire pair.

Mesh's Mesh Titan X1800 Fire is just about as fast as gaming PCs get, but for this much money, you'd expect your system to last a good while. We've no doubts about Crossfire's performance, but to make the most of it, we'd go for a system with a single card and add another later.