Product Reviews

New technology is expensive as a rule, but there are exceptions. Mesh's Matrix Titanium Dual X2 is one, providing an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ dual-core processor in an averagely priced PC.

The X2 4200+ has two 2.2GHz cores, each with 512KB of cache memory. As with all dual-core chips, for the X2 4200+ to work efficiently it needs to run multithreaded applications or perform two tasks simultaneously.

Our video-encoding test is multithreaded, which explains the Matrix Titanium's very high Shopper application benchmark. However, when we ran the tests again while encoding an MPEG2 video in the background it achieved excellent scores in both tests, with 155 in our benchmarks and 57 per cent of the video encoded.

You may think that Mesh must have scrimped and saved on the other components, but

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it hasn't. The processor is backed up by 1GB of PC3200 DDR memory and a 256MB ATI Radeon X800XL graphics card, so it's great for games and standard desktop applications. Thanks to the dual-core processor you can even play games while performing an intensive background task such as encoding a video.

The Matrix Titanium Dual X2 uses an Asus A8N nForce 4 SLI motherboard, so you could run two high-end graphics cards in tandem. The motherboard also has all the advantages of the nForce chipset including dual network interfaces and high-definition eight-channel audio, which is catered for by the Creative Inspire 7700 speakers.

The 300GB hard disk provides lots of storage space, and the 16X Sony DVD drive can write to all formats including high-capacity double-layer discs.

Only the ViewSonic VP171B-2 17" LCD monitor lets the system down, with poor vertical viewing angles and colour. It's far from terrible, though, and has one digital and two analogue inputs. A Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse round off the system. They're comfortable to use and the mouse comes with a recharge cradle.

The PC is housed in Mesh's new case, which we don't like much. Structurally it's fine, but the silver on the front looks cheap. Don't let that put you off, though, as this is an amazing system for the money. As more applications are written for dual-core processors, it can only get better.