Mesh Elite Quad FX

When it comes to simple design panache, there's little to rival the likes of Sony - just look at its VAIO RM1N on p44. All the features video editors could want, in a smart, desirable case with enough features to keep going for years. And so, at first glance, it's easy to feel a twinge of sympathy for the Mesh Elite Quad FX. The case is the same we've been seeing since the June 2005 issue of PC Pro, and it's hard to find much that's inspiring about the outside of this system.

Instead, all of the headline-worthy aspects of the Elite are hidden inside. Mesh installs an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU - a 2.4GHz, quad-core processor. It also installs 4GB of 667MHz RAM. In practice, this poses something of a problem for the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium included: 32-bit versions of Vista can access a maximum of 4GB of RAM, but that has to include the kernel-mode address space. This means that the Elite Quad FX actually only shows 3070MB.

In practice, though, any performance hit you get from the slight deficiency in addressable RAM versus physical RAM is minimal, with the Elite scoring a more than satisfactory 1.39 in our benchmarks, comparing well to the similarly specified RM1N, despite costing £1,700 less.

With top-end graphics cards costing what they do these days, it's no surprise to find Mesh's choice of graphics card is a more modest option. The 256MB Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT might be a DirectX 10 card, but its 3D performance is distinctly lacking in the latest titles: Call of Duty 2, at its lowest settings, ran at 14fps, while Call of Juarez was little more than an eye-catching slideshow, running at an average of 9.3fps.

It won't make a scrap of difference if you don't play games, though, and does keep the price attractive, particularly as there are few compromises elsewhere. The hard disk is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drive with 500GB of storage space. Should you find yourself running out of space, there are three free internal 3.5in drive bays, with a satisfyingly correspondent number of free SATA ports. There's also a RAID controller, giving extra flexibility should you decide to add some more disks to your setup.

The motherboard is also home to other features including Gigabit Ethernet and a Realtek ALC883 audio controller. The six channels might not be as extravagant as the eight-channel surround-sound controllers on some motherboards, but it's more than enough for most. The motherboard also has an unoccupied 16x PCI Express slot, so if you do decide to bin the 8500 at some point, you'll be able to go all out and install an SLI configuration.

It's hard to get excited by the Mirai DML-522W100 TFT; all matte-grey plastic and with just D-SUB and DVI-D ports. But we've seen it before (web ID: 104803), and we're as impressed as ever by the panel's solid image quality, which is what will really count day-to-day. Colours are reproduced accurately, although movie-buffs might be slightly disappointed by the lack of punch and saturation.

All in all, the real success of this system is application power on a budget. On those terms, it's more than a match for the Sony RM1N, despite the enormous price difference. It's also stiff competition compared to another Mesh system, the Elite Storm Pro. The Quad FX is more than £100 cheaper, and offers twice the RAM and twice the processing cores, as well as the same sized TFT.

The Mesh Elite Storm Pro stays on the A List by virtue of its even greater flexibility: the 2GB and dual-core CPU aren't as flamboyant, but there's an 8800 GTS for 3D power, as well as a digital TV tuner and 5.1 speakers; the Quad FX is the first Mesh system we've seen in a while not to sport at least a set of stereo speakers. Note that the Elite Storm Pro also gets a two-year on-site warranty, which compares well with the Quad's one-year on-site. If you're looking for a system that offers straight processing power for apps such as video editing, though, you'll have trouble finding more power for the money.

Author: Dave Stevenson