Product Reviews

If you budget between £700 and £1,000 for a PC system you can get mass-market value for money while ensuring that your computer will be powerful enough to last the course. Mesh pitches the imposing X-treme 3200+ FCX in the middle of this price range and strikes a good balance between performance and peripheral components.

A 939-pin AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor does the hard work, aided by two 256MB modules of DDR RAM running in dual-channel mode. This setup has enough power to cope well with office applications and tackle more demanding multimedia applications as well, as the Computer Shopper benchmark scores indicate.

The 160GB hard disk drive from Maxtor provides plenty of room for applications and data. If you want to compile your own full-length movies, though, we would recommend fitting a second hard

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disk.

A DVD-ROM and double-layer DVD+/-RW optical drive are fitted. The latter allows you to squeeze up to 8GB of data on to a disc and author your own DVD movies. A PCI modem is installed but, with luck, you'll use the integrated network adaptor for a broadband internet connection.

Core application performance is matched by 3D gaming performance. A 128MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card may not be the quickest available, but it can cope comfortably with most gaming and will even run Doom 3 at a playable frame rate, albeit at an unambitious resolution.

Mesh provides a 17" ViewSonic VA721 display, which has a native resolution of 1,280x1,024 and a pixel response time of 25ms. This doesn't present a problem for everyday applications, but fast-moving images such as games cause on-screen ghosting. Despite relying on a captured D-sub input, the panel produces a crisp image once auto-tuned.

Audio is processed by an integrated ALC850 processor capable of eight-channel output. Mesh supplies Creative Inspire P5800 speakers, which although capable of only six-channel surround sound still provide strong audio output.

While systems at this price succeed or fail on their value for money, there should be a good balance of components. There are no serious omissions in the X-treme 3200+ FCX and it gives solid performance in all areas. This is a good mix of components for a fair price.