Product Reviews

Mesh's Elite E6600 GTS shows that gaming PCs fitted with the latest graphics cards don't have to be overly expensive. It's the first PC we've seen to come with a GeForce 8800 GTS, one of Nvidia's two new DirectX 10-compatible graphics chips, but it costs under £1,000.

The 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS card is less powerful than the range-topping 8800GTX processor, but it still made short work of our 3D graphics tests. It blitzed through our Call of Duty 2 test at 56.8fps and raced ahead in our Prey benchmark with a score of 61.3fps. It should have no trouble playing the latest graphically demanding games, including upcoming DirectX 10-dependent titles.

We were also impressed with this computer's performance in our application benchmarks. It worked swiftly through our image-editing and video-encoding tests. With slower RAM, it isn't quite as fast as CyberPower's similarly specified Infinity 970 Crossfire, but it's more than fast enough for all but the most demanding of users.

Mesh supplies the Elite E6600 GTS with a 19in Hanns.G monitor. This isn't widescreen, so it isn't ideal for

The Creative Inspire T6100 surround-sound speakers are good enough for movies and gaming, but aren't well suited to music. They have a lot of bass, but sound woolly and muffled overall. A better set of speakers would reveal the high sound quality of the computer's Creative X-Fi sound card. This provides realistic effects in games that support EAX processing; however, this PC comes with Windows Vista Home Premium, so you'll need to apply a patch to get EAX working. You can read more about this at http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy.

Keen gamers can add a second SLI graphics card for even better performance, although a double-height card would prevent the use of the spare PCI slot. As it is, the 8800GTS card's thick heatsink makes it a squeeze to use the PCI Express x4 slot. There are seven USB2 ports for plugging in external peripherals, though. There's more room inside the Infinity 970 Crossfire, but with two spare 31/2in drive bays and two 51/4in bays this PC has room for adding more storage.

Mesh's Elite E6600 GTS is a powerful gaming PC with a quality graphics processor and sound card. With a decent quality monitor and fast Windows performance, it's also a capable general-purpose PC. It's also great value, so it wins a Best Buy award.