Labs

Alongside the raft of monstrous silver Cosmos 1000 cases, the Mesh's standard Cooler Master Cavalier chassis looks small, but we had no reason to doubt its ability to match up to its rivals. Unfortunately, this rather dated and cramped black housing proved to be the Storm GTX Quad Pro's undoing, and it's all down to the lack of adequate cooling.

The stock Intel cooler that comes with a QX6850 should easily be able to keep it running, especially with no overclocking employed. But the air has to keep flowing over the components, and with a pair of hefty GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards baking beneath it and only a single 120mm rear case fan to

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draw out the heat, the chassis soon becomes worryingly hot to the touch.

The twin 500GB Samsung SpinPoint T hard disks take the brunt of the cool air drawn in by the front fan, leaving the rest of the interior far too stuffy for comfort. As a result, we had to run our 2D benchmark applications in several phases to ensure we got a result from each before the system overheated and froze, which it did on several occasions. It scored a decent 1.6 in the end, but stability was questionable to say the least.

With a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards, we expected it to race clear of most in our 3D tests, but although it did outpace all of the single-card systems, it didn't do so by a great margin. And it was left behind by the dual-8800 Ultra solutions of the Scan and Evesham in the intensive DirectX 10 tests of Call of Juarez.

While there's undoubtedly plenty of power in the Mesh Storm GTX Quad Pro, we're not entirely convinced this is the ideal chassis and configuration to get the best from the components.

This leaves us reluctant to recommend it, despite the 24in Iiyama TFT, 1TB of storage, 5.1 speakers and a hybrid TV tuner. It's a well-specified PC, but in this chassis it simply isn't reliable enough.