Product Reviews

Warranties are one of those unfortunate things that you only really appreciate when things go wrong. So, if nothing goes awry with the Inspire in the first three years of its life, you might regret buying it over the less well-guaranteed Mesh Matrix which, in nearly all our objective and subjective tests, matched or beat the Systemax. Where the inspire wins is the warranty: that third year of on-site cover could mean much more to you in 2007 than the Mesh's return-to-base offering.

Once you start playing about in both PCs, however, it becomes clear that Mesh has the advantage, partially thanks to a far superior chassis. For instance, all the Inspire's power cables are strapped together in a wad that hangs loosely in the middle of the case, making adding memory and extra drives more awkward than it should be. The only plus point for Systemax is that it supplies its 512MB of PC3200 RAM on a single DIMM, leaving two sockets free. But on an everyday level, the Inspire is far noisier than the Matrix, with a bothersome fan at the rear being the main culprit.

The CTX screen is no match for Mesh's ViewSonic either. It struggled

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to lock onto the graphics card's signal until we pressed Auto Adjust, and it didn't shine in our technical tests - for example, there was some significant banding across a supposedly smooth colour spectrum screen. Fortunately, this sort of issue doesn't show up in everyday use, and it has quick enough response times to play Unreal Tournament 2004 with no annoying lag.

This PC will cope with games for some time to come too, with its scores of 66fps in Unreal Tournament 2004 (at 1,280 x 1,024) and 38fps in Halo on a par with both the Mesh and Evesham. That's a good showing for the nVidia GeForce 6800 LE chipset, which - unlike the 9800 Pro inside the Mesh and Evesham - supports Shader Model 3. Far Cry has already been patched to support this technology, and several of the coming year's games are scheduled to follow suit.

At first glance, it might seem like the Inspire is significantly slower than the Mesh in our 2D benchmarks, but it's worth digging down into the figures. The only area where the Matrix beat it by any margin was our Excel tasks, where many complex graphs are drawn and redrawn - our tests show that ATi graphics cards tend to perform more quickly than their nVidia counterparts. For the arguably more important video-encoding test, the Inspire actually beat the Matrix by 10 per cent.

Just like Mesh and Evesham, Systemax provides an 8x DVD writer that can also write to dual-layer DVD+R and +RW discs, but it falls behind its rivals with the 120GB rather than 160GB hard disk.

This shortfall, when added to the inferior screen, noisier output and lower quality case, means we can't recommend the Inspire over the Matrix. Unless, that is, you value peace of mind above all else.