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Mesh Elite Ice 5 Pro review

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Verdict

Superb performance, great peripherals and even an SSD for a remarkable price

Review Date: 22 Sep 2009

Reviewed By: Mike Jennings

Price when reviewed: £869 (£999 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
5 stars out of 6

Value for Money
5 stars out of 6

Performance
3 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

In the last few months, Intel’s Core i5 and Core i7 processors have been popular with PC makers, as have Asus motherboards, while ATI’s new graphics cards have earned rave reviews. Mesh has stuck to these trends with the Elite Ice 5 Pro to good effect.

An overall benchmark result of 1.89 indicates that the Core i5 has enough muscle to handle video editing and HD video encoding, for instance, even if faster systems are available if you’re willing to stump up more cash.

Gaming performance is assured, too, thanks to its ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card. Our low, medium and high quality tests were handled without fuss, and a score of 27fps in our very high-quality Crysis benchmark is near-playable at the game’s most demanding settings. You'll see faster gaming from the top-end 5000-series cards, but for now it's an impressive showing.

The Mesh comes to the fore in other areas. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is installed on a solid-state 64GB OCZ hard disk, and this advantage tells in the snappy menus and improved boot time. There’s also enough room left over to install commonly used or demanding applications to boost them too. A 750GB mechanical hard disk is also included for data storage.

The chassis is a high point, too. The NZXT Hush is packed with noise-cancelling foam and rubber grommets to absorb and nullify most of the sound and, despite the ATI GPU and stock Intel cooler generating a fair amount of noise, hardly any escapes. We could only hear the PC quite close up.

Mesh has also done a good job of keeping the interior tidy, making it easy to access the various DIMM slots, PCI Express sockets and drive bays that lie empty inside. There’s tool-free entry throughout, too, which makes upgrading even easier.

The Elite Ice 5 Pro comes with a 24in Iiyama Prolite E2407HDS monitor, which provided bright and accurate colours alongside a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 and HDMI input. It's ideal for gaming and movie watching, and the large desktop space makes multi-tasking easy. It’s just a shame there’s no Blu-ray reader to take advantage of the full-HD resolution.

The Mesh’s final trump card is its price: at £869, it’s an affordable, fast and well-specified system that comes with remarkably few caveats. It’s not the fastest system we’ve seen for this sort of price but, if absolute power takes a back seat to all-round quality, very few systems are as accomplished as the Mesh.

Author: Mike Jennings

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Comments

User comments

If you buy a Mesh, I hope your "buying experience" is a lot less gut wrenching than mine's been.

In essence (and to save a great deal of typing) a Slayer Dragon was delivered after a great deal of messing around with a US graphics card.

A month later it is back in for repair with a suspected US graphics card.

A shame as my last Mesh experience some 4 years ago was excellent. I won't be going near them again.

By derekdobson on 29 Oct 2009

Great machines. Poor service.

Their ordering system made an error. Deliveries were delayed without informing me. Emails go unanswered. Phone calls can be on hold for 20 minutes. And I still didn't have a PC. I cancelled, that's just too many things wrong.

The specs are very, very good. But woe betide you if you have a problem.

By John_Samuel on 4 Nov 2009

Shocking Service

Four weeks after placing my order and no sign of a delivery, I phoned Mesh and was told the processor was out of stock, but deliveries where due and my system would be shipped within four days. Five days later I was told the graphics cards where now out of stock and they could not give me a new delivery date. Needless to say I cancelled my order.

By xxxxx on 16 Nov 2009

Continuing supply problems

I've had a similar experience 4 weeks almost and no PC

Apparently there are no graphics cards available

The only comment from my elusive salesman is try ringing next week, my emails go unanswered, helpdesks that don't help or have any answers, try someone else than Mesh if you want a PC on time or at all I’m cancelling mine.

Strange the PC mags have no trouble getting a review PC and have no qualms recommending them either! shame

By Treeboy on 19 Nov 2009

MESH problems

By Treeboy on 19 Nov 2009

And another long wait

Ordered a similar Ice 5 750CS with i7 860 and 5850 graphics on the 1st Nov and still waiting. Supposedly the status is "Production Pending, Components Allocated to Machine", but it's been like this for over a week. Seemingly you're expected to pay the extra for Fast Track build - hopefully I'm not being further pushed down the queue by other purchasers choosing this option!

By jehu01 on 26 Nov 2009

Mesh change graphics card on Ice 5 750 CS

I ordered one of these excellent value beasts on the basis of the great reviews but failed to notice that Mesh have changed the grphics card and are no longer fitting the Radeon 4890 but the cheaper 5770.
Now some might prefer the 5770 but most will agree that the 4890 is a faster card.
I suppose that the change is in response to the shortage of ATI cards (see article on this site) and that ATI says that its 5770 cards are not affected by the shortage problem.
I'm in a quandry - do I press for the 4890 to be fitted and wait - or do I accept that I should have noticed the change?
In my view, the 750CS no longer meets the rave reviews that it had in the mag and on this site.

By redkiteyorks on 28 Nov 2009

... another long wait ended

In the interests of fairness, the Ice 5 750CS I ordered on 1st Nov (see above), was dispatched on 4th Dec and arrived the 7th after the weekend.

Everything fine so far, apart from the initial setup of Windows 7 which would hang on a black screen, rectified by rreinstalling from the supplied CD.

Better (any!) communication from Mesh over the delays in delivery would have been appreciated - I'm happy to accept that the system may be delayed as long as reasonable time frames and options are given. None were given in this instance.

By jehu01 on 9 Dec 2009

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