Product Reviews

AMD's FX processors are known for their incredible performance, and the Xtreme FX60 goes one step further by using two FX cores on the same chip. Mesh is the first company to bring us a PC based on one of the FX60 processors and, as expected, it's expensive but powerful.

With its dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM, the Xtreme system managed to rack up some of the highest ever scores in our application benchmarks. As well as an excellent overall score, the Xtreme FX60 sailed through our video-encoding test with a score of 225, thanks to the test application's dual-core support.

For the many applications that still use only a single core, such as most games and office applications, the FX60 is actually slower than its predecessor,

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the FX57. The FX57 runs at 2.8GHz, while the FX60 has two cores, each of which runs at 2.6GHz.

Even using a single core, games performance won't be a massive problem on this PC, as it comes with two GeForce 7800GT graphics cards in SLI mode. It managed 92fps in Doom 3 running at 1,600x1,200 with ultra-high quality.

Mesh supplies the Xtreme FX60 with a 20" widescreen display, which has a massive resolution of 1,680x1,050. It's brilliant for working on two documents side-by-side, and even better for entertainment. However, we noticed that the greyscale test didn't produce smooth transitions, so you may prefer a different monitor if you'll be doing a lot of photo-editing work.

Instead of a single hard disk, Mesh has opted for a 500GB striped RAID-0 array consisting of two 250GB disks. The DVD writer is a little sluggish, writing DVD-R DL discs at just 4X.

For applications that use both processor cores, the Xtreme FX60 is the fastest PC we've seen and will only get better as more applications are written for it. However, it is also very expensive. Opting for a single-core processor and the same graphics cards will get you nearly the same level of performance for around £300 less. Still, if you really want the speed and high-quality components and have the money, you won't have any complaints.