Product Reviews

It's easy to judge a book by its cover. Take a quick glance at Mesh's new X-Treme G7600 and you'd be forgiven for thinking that it doesn't really look very extreme at all. It's shod in Mesh's standard, albeit impressive, case and the only real standout feature is its 19in widescreen ViewSonic monitor. But underneath that familiarly chunky form there lies a surprise - and it's one that will have cash-strapped gamers clapping their hands in glee.

That surprise is one of nVidia's brand new graphics cards, the GeForce 7600GT. In these days where high-end graphics cards have hulking copper heatsinks with impressively huge fans strapped to their back, the 7600GT looks a little out of place. It's not very big, has an ample 256MB of RAM and its fan is really rather understated. We were eager to see how it coped with our demanding Call of Duty 2 benchmark, but were stunned to find that it raced to a smooth result of 28.8fps. Despite our benchmark PC housing a powerful nVidia GeForce 7800GT graphics card worth over £200, the Mesh's 7600GT was less than a single frame per second behind. This is a hugely impressive result, but the X-Treme G7600's talents don't end there. As Mesh has installed an Asus SLI-equipped motherboard, you can add another GeForce 7600GT card a few months down the line to give it even more 3D poke.

All aboard

There's no skimping on the rest of the Mesh's specification either and we were impressed to see

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an AMD dual-core processor nestling inside. Even the slowest AMD X2 chips are mighty performers, but Mesh has employed the nippy 4200+ model. It's complemented by two 512MB sticks of DDR400 RAM and a 250GB hard drive. Needless to say, these components propelled the Mesh to a fantastic score in our benchmarks and it finished the video-encoding test in half the time of our benchmark PC. That's enough power to speed through tasks that would bring other PCs to their knees.

This isn't just a PC that looks good on paper, though. The ViewSonic VA1912w monitor (reviewed on page 38) is a 19in model with a native resolution of 1440 x 900. That's enough Desktop space to comfortably work on two documents side by side, but for games and movies, the widescreen aspect ratio shows them at their cinematic best. Image quality is also good, thanks to a bright panel, although colour accuracy wasn't as good as that on more expensive monitors. Despite these minor quibbles, our DVD movies looked great and the low 8ms response time did a good job of keeping ghosting to a minimum in fast moving games.

Sound decision

If the Mesh's gaming credentials and benchmark prowess don't promise enough quality entertainment already, there's also a set of 5.1 surround sound speakers thrown into the bargain. Creative's T6060's share their predecessors lack of subtlety, but these aren't speakers designed for hi-fi reproduction. They sound a bit thick and woolly, but do a good job of blustering their way through an action-packed game and movie soundtracks. Given the choice, we'd probably do away with the surround speakers in favour of a higher quality 2.1 set, though.

Mesh's X-Treme G7600 is a great entertainment PC that can cope with anything you decide to throw at it. Whether it's the latest games or a newly-released Hollywood blockbuster, the Mesh will keep you riveted to the screen. And with the SLI motherboard providing an easy upgrade path in the future, this is one machine that'll keep you grinning for some time to come.