Product Reviews

The Mesh Titan Pro 24 comes in a familiar case that the London-based PC company uses for many of its premium packages. It may be standard, but it's far from dull: made of aluminium, it's both light and strong, and the front presents a distinctive wave shape, with slats between sections of metal to allow a stylish blue light to shine through. It may not seem like a priority if you'll be hiding it under a desk, but if you're looking for a PC to last you a good few years, this is the kind of chassis that will give you the space and sturdiness you need.

The Titan is just as impressive on the inside as out. Its Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 processor runs at 3GHz, with both cores being used to good effect in our benchmarks. An overall score of 218% in our general (2D) tests included especially high results for our multiple application benchmarks, helped along by a generous 4GB of RAM, so this is a system that should more than satisfy demanding Windows users.

Gamers are also well catered for thanks to the inclusion of a powerful nVidia GeForce 8800GT card with 512MB of its own memory, freeing the processor from display duties and allowing the whole system to run faster as a result. It's one of the best value graphics cards around at the moment, and will allow you to play all but the very latest 3D games at high settings; we just had to turn things down a bit for Crysis, today's most demanding title. In our tests, a storming 3D benchmark result of 222% in Call of Duty 2 was evidence of the 8800GT's ability.

Pumping iron

The rest of the components on offer complete the Mesh's performance credentials. As a Marks & Spencer voiceover might say, this isn't just 4GB of RAM, it's 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM - a luxury that helped the Titan achieve those impressive benchmark scores. The chugging noises and grunts that emerged from the computer during testing, though, suggested that quieter cooling would have been a wise investment too.

While 4GB certainly is copious, and more than enough for any task you're likely to throw at a PC at the moment, the pairing of this amount with Windows Vista still causes some well documented problems. The standard version of the operating system, which Mesh have wisely stuck to, uses 32-bit addressing, and while the technical implications of that are too boring to explain here, the upshot is that only three of the four gigabytes of memory can actually be used; the processor simply can't see the rest.

To take advantage of that last gigabyte, you'd have to upgrade to one of the 64-bit editions of Vista, and that's more than a financial concern: it would mean sacrificing any hardware or software you may own (or want to buy) for which

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64-bit drivers haven't been released. And, even this long after Vista's debut, that's a lengthy list. For now, 3GB should be plenty, but if you like to run several memory-hungry apps at once, such as photo and video editors, it's a potential bottleneck to be aware of. None of this is Mesh's fault; it's Microsoft's problem, and applies to all Vista PCs.

Muscle bound

That striking, stylish case is of a conspicuously high quality, and if the interior feels a bit cramped, it's only because so much has already been installed. The graphics card sits above a dedicated sound card - a Sound Blaster X-Fi, which capably drives the supplied set of surround speakers - and a TV tuner card, a thoughtful inclusion that helps to make the Titan an all-round home system straight out of the box. That does leave you without many free slots, but there can't be much more you'd want to cram inside with all aspects of media already catered for.

Unlike with cheaper PCs, SLI graphics configurations are supported, allowing you to add a second 8800GT graphics card (or indeed a pair of even better cards) to ratchet up performance in top-end 3D games. And with two 500GB hard drives fitted already and two slots free for more, you've got the option of increasing the storage capacity if you somehow manage to fill up a terabyte. Five years ago, that would have been considered a decent capacity to serve a large corporation. Then again, that was before there were four seasons of Lost available for download...

To put you in touch with all those media extras, Mesh have thrown in a remote control for browsing your entertainment content, though the white unit is an odd match. There's a decent complement of ports and sockets: four USB in addition to the PS/2 ports used for the standard-issue Logitech keyboard and mouse, eSATA for fast external storage, Ethernet, FireWire, S/PDIF digital audio output, and even a parallel port in case you need to attach antique peripherals. A card reader is also included, accepting most major types of memory, including SD, MMC, CD and MD.

In your face

22 inch screens are becoming the norm, but a PC such as this deserves something even bigger, so you get a huge 24 inch Iiyama display. Both VGA and HDMI inputs are provided, and picture quality was sharp, but we found colour reproduction a little disappointing; images were slightly washed-out, lacking the bright vibrancy you'd get with a more expensive model. The 5.1 speakers also proved adequate rather than outstanding, delivering decent sound when used with movies, games and films, but nothing more notable than that. Audiophiles would want to invest in a better set, but casual users should be happy enough.

Even for a system that includes almost everything you could conceivably need in a personal computer, £1199 is a lot of money. You could shop hard and find a PC with a similar processor and graphics for less cash, but chances are it wouldn't provide the same build quality and extras, and although we've griped a little about the monitor, it could have been a lot worse. The Titan Pro is a powerful multimedia machine with the raw power to coast through almost any software, whether for work or play, and plenty of goodies to make sure you won't feel short-changed.