Product Reviews

Until now, we could always rely on AMD to have consistent stock of its latest Athlon processors. While Intel's reservoirs of 1GHz Pentium IIIs and 2GHz Pentium 4s were running dry, AMD kept knocking out the chips needed to build the market share it has now. However, AMD's Athlon is seemingly reaching the end of its life - the 2.17GHz Athlon XP 2700+ isn't expected in volume levels until early December, so this 2.25GHz Athlon XP 2800+ could possibly be the last Athlon before Opteron appears, along with next year's 0.09-micron die shrink.

Mesh already has a killer performance PC with the Matrix XP 2700+RD97, combining the 2.17GHz Athlon XP 2700+ with PC2700 memory and Nvidia's latest Dual DDR nForce2 motherboard chipset. So it follows that the Matrix XP 2800+RD9 uses the nForce2 chipset, and will come with Abit's new NF7-S motherboard when the CPUs are available.

Like the Asus board in the 2700+RD97, the Abit offers on-board Ethernet, AGP 8x support and Serial ATA for future hard disk upgrades. The 2800+RD9 comes with both USB 2 and FireWire as standard, and there's even an optical output on the backplane in addition to the six-channel analog outputs. Two USB 2 ports are also located here, and there's a total of five PCI slots - four of which are left free with the V.90 modem in place.

More importantly, however, Mesh has once again pushed the CPU and motherboard chipset to its limits by using two 256MB PC2700 DIMMS to complement the processor's 166MHz (effectively 333MHz) front side bus and the nForce2's Dual DDR memory system.

So, despite its meagre 2.25GHz clock speed, the Mesh is faster than both the Evesham and Dell 3.06GHz Pentium 4 systems (see p124 and p125), even with the Dell's 512MB of PC1066 RDRAM and the Evesham's RAID hard disk configuration. In fact, the Mesh's overall 2D benchmark score of 1.75 with the nForce2 chipset is nothing short of phenomenal for a 2.25GHz chip - especially for the money. However, the chip is an early sample, and the Mesh comes with a slower 120GB

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Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 hard disk, so it's not as quick as the Matrix XP 2700+RD97's score of 1.84.

Similarly, the 3D performance was more than enough, but not as quick as the 2700+ machine or the 3.06GHz PCs. With a 3DMark2001 SE score of 14,148 at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour the Mesh is still very fast, though. Thanks can go to the Sapphire graphics card, which uses the as-yet unrivalled ATi Radeon 9700 Pro chipset and offers superb performance and future-proofing with DirectX 9 compatibility.

The Evesham and Dell score more Brownie points on features, though. The Mesh's monitor, for example, is a superb 19in Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 920 CRT, but the Evesham and Dell come with great-quality DVI-connected 18in and 17in TFTs respectively.

Similarly, the Mesh's Creative Inspire 5300 speakers are more than adequate, but aren't nearly as impressive as the Dell's superb Altec Lansing THX-certified speaker set. There's no dedicated sound card in the Mesh, but the nForce2's integrated audio more than makes up for this, especially with its hardware-accelerated surround sound system.

You lose out on hard disk space, with a simple 120GB Maxtor disk compared with the Dell's 200GB Western Digital disk and the Evesham's dual 80GB RAID configuration. But do you really need more than 120GB? Only the budding Spielbergs among us are likely to need more, and most users will probably find at least 80GB of that space is unused.

Similarly, the Mesh more than makes up for its lack of the finest frills with a very competitive price of £1,299 - much more affordable than the Dell and Evesham, and faster to boot. That's not to say it's really short on features - unlike the Matrix XP 2700+RD97 it also comes with DVD writing functionality in the form of a Panasonic combo drive. This writes DVD-Rs for use in set top DVD players, and also provides backwards-compatible backup with its DVD-RAM functionality. It will also read CDs, but the additional 48x/16x/48x TEAC CD-RW will do it much quicker. There's nothing lost in terms of either speed or compatibility with storage.

Mesh will supply a three-year, return-to-base warranty with the Matrix XP 2800+RD9. The only issue at the moment concerns availability, and with volume levels of the Athlon XP 2700+ still weeks away, it's debatable when this machine is going to be available, and if it will still be at the top of the performance pile when it is. At the moment, however, AMD and Nvidia have once again shown that they can compete with the might of Intel at a fraction of the cost, let's hope they keep up the competition next year.