Mesh Matrix 3200+ Power review

Competing with huge multinationals like Dell is always going to be difficult for British companies, but Dell's new Dimension 8300 (see opposite) raises the stakes to a ridiculous level. Somehow, it has put together a £1,299 3GHz PC with an 18in TFT, a rocking speaker set and a DVD burner. It all seems a bit unfair, but Mesh still has a small advantage over Dell that it can whip out in times of crisis: the AMD Athlon.

Despite its ageing architecture, the Athlon is still going strong, and the latest revision is the 2.2GHz Athlon XP 3200+ found in the Mesh Matrix 3200+ Power. It also runs on a 400MHz front side bus, although everyone's in agreement that this is about as far as the Athlon can go before AMD has to bring a new architecture to market.

For the moment, however, it still offers stunning performance. With an overall score of 2.27 in our 2D benchmarks, it's well over twice the speed of our 2GHz Pentium 4 reference PC - not bad for a 2.2GHz chip. Plus, with the latest 400MHz revision of the nForce2 motherboard chipset, the 3D performance is a force to be reckoned with, especially with a Radeon 9800 Pro in tow.

In fact, in 3DMark03's Mother Nature test, which stresses the DirectX 9 features, the Mesh scored 33fps - one of the highest scores we've seen. And the score of 17,326 in 3DMark2001 SE at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour shows that this PC will be able to keep up with 3D games for at least a couple of years.

That said, as with the Multivision Ionix 98 Platinum (see p59), it would have been even faster if Mesh had supplied quicker memory. Yes, the 512MB of Samsung PC3200 DDR SDRAM runs at 400MHz and is split over two DIMMs to take advantage of the nForce2's dual-channel memory controller. However, with CAS 3 latency, it's debatable whether the increased bandwidth is worth it.

This is why the 2D graphics benchmark score - which stresses the memory in Photoshop - came out at just 1.85, compared with the processor-intensive word-processing and spreadsheet benchmark of 2.59. However, you're still unlikely to notice the difference, and the rest of the machine is thankfully well specified.

For example, many PCs just come with a DVD burner for optical storage, but the 3200+ Power attempts to cover every base possible by including a DVD-ROM and CD-RW combo drive, as well as a DVD-RW and DVD+RW combo drive. So you can write CD-Rs at a super-fast 32x and copy DVD discs on the fly too. This is certainly convenient, but it almost seems excessive - a bit like the hard disk.

Not content with the standard 120GB capacity, Mesh has fitted a huge 200GB Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 disk. With this sort of capacity on offer, it's debatable whether you'll ever need to upgrade the hard disk, but if you do you'll find it a doddle thanks to Mesh's ingenious case layout.

The jury's still out on the Mesh case's two-tone styling, but you only have to pull the handle on the side panel to remove it and then the innards are all yours for the taking. Once inside, you'll be happy to see that Mesh has tidied all the cables neatly out of the way, and the side-mounted hard-disk cage means you can slide out the disk without fear of knocking anything on the motherboard. Not only that, but the screwless catches make removing the drives easy too.

Easy access is the key here, and this is further emphasised by the pair of front-mounted USB 2 ports for quick and easy hot-swapping. Four more ports are provided on the back for permanently connected devices, as well as the classic parallel and serial ports. Plus, the Asus A7N8X Deluxe (revision 2) motherboard has integrated FireWire, and Mesh has taken advantage of this with a backplate that provides both a six-pin and four-pin FireWire port.