Product Reviews

With the first Athlon 64 chips barely out of the door, AMD has already decided to up the speed stakes. The Athlon 64 3400+, on which this latest Mesh PC is based, is also released in good time to pre-empt the unveiling of Intel's Prescott chips next month. This hikes the processor's speed from a previous flat 2GHz to 2.25GHz, making the 3400+ the highest-clocked processor AMD has ever produced.

We were expecting the Matrix64 to be on a par with the Athlon FX-51 PCs we saw in last month's group test, but it truly surprised us by blasting past all comers to achieve 3.16 in our 2D benchmarks - the first PC ever to break the 3.00 barrier.

This stormer of a chip is backed up by a near-infallible array of components. Using the ultra-fast ATi Radeon 9800 XT graphics card, it amassed a huge 25,511 in 3DMark2001 SE (XGA, 32-bit colour depth). Few systems can match this; even those in last month's group test struggle to peek over 20,000. It's also helped by a high-quality Iiyama

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ProLite E481S-B monitor: this 19in TFT's 3D prowess helped it to win our group test this month.

This TFT also makes the Matrix a pleasure to use in general, with a bright screen and - thanks to that 19in diagonal - large pixels. We also found the Matrix surprisingly quiet considering the high specification inside, with its low hum being noticeable but not annoying. This means the speakers don't need to work too hard to be heard, but with the Creative Inspire 7700 7.1 speakers partnering the excellent Audigy 2 ZS sound card, cranking up the volume will never be a problem.

We can't fault Mesh's other choices either. The Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard offers five PCI slots, two of which are spare, and there's an empty DIMM socket too - not that many people will wish to upgrade from the already plentiful 1GB of PC3200 RAM Mesh supplies. There's plenty of connectivity built in, with eight USB 2 ports, two FireWire ports, plus Gigabit Ethernet and, the big surprise, 802.11b WLAN. Mesh itself adds a V.90 modem for good measure. We were also pleased to see Mesh take advantage of the motherboard's RAID controller, connecting two 120GB Maxtor Serial ATA hard disks in a striped array. Meanwhile, a dual-format Sony DVD writer and a CD writer provide plenty of external storage options.

There's no room in Mesh's budget for a full-blown version of Microsoft Office, but it does include Works Suite 2004, which includes Word 2002, Works 7, Money 2004 and more. Add a three-year, on-site warranty, and this PC is almost impossible to resist - if you can afford it.