Product Reviews

The X-Treme Fire is one of the first CrossFire systems from Mesh and is aimed at hardcore gamers. It has a pair of 256MB ATI Radeon X850 XT graphics cards, which blitzed their way through our Doom 3 test. To push the X-Treme harder, we increased the bright, blur-free Phillips 20" monitor to its native 1,600x1,200 resolution and reran the test. The result was a smooth 59.7fps.

The X-Treme should have no trouble running the latest graphically intensive games. However, its graphics performance is only around the same level as that provided by a single nVidia 7800 GTX card, and that card can provide even more performance when teamed with another in SLI mode.

Fortunately, the X-Treme Fire FX is more than just two graphics cards in CrossFire mode. With all the emphasis placed on graphics, sound quality is often forgotten. This PC's Creative X-Fi sound card delivers 7.1

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surround sound through a full-bodied and powerful-sounding set of Creative T7900 speakers. It also has EAX processing, which delivers more realistic sound through games that support it, such as Doom 3. The dual-core Athlon X2 4400+ processor is no slouch either, and did particularly well in our video-encoding test. Most current games won't take advantage of the extra core, so the appeal of the dual-core processor is limited for now, although titles that support it are starting to be released.

The X-Treme's powerful games performance comes at a price. The massive cooling fans on the CrossFire cards produce a lot of noise, which is distracting. The presence of two graphics cards as well as the X-Fi sound card and a riser for the FireWire port means that filling the one remaining PCI slot will be a tight fit. The DVD writer is a little on the slow side, writing two-layer discs at just 4X. The massive 500GB hard disk should be more than enough, though, and there are two free drive bays for adding more storage. We would prefer a memory card reader as well as a wired keyboard and mouse instead of the bundled wireless set. A more attractive case design would have helped, too.

The biggest problem with this PC is that it's very expensive. You can get similar gaming performance at a much lower price with a single-core processor and a 7800GTX graphics card. But if you have the money, you'll get a lot of high-end components and excellent peripherals with this PC.