Mesh X-treme FX60 review

Gaming PCs are ten a penny. Some are cheap, most are expensive, but it takes a special machine to achieve the perfect blend of price and power. The X-treme FX60 is Mesh's attempt to deliver the goods in both areas. It uses the fastest gaming CPU available and twin graphics cards, so we didn't expect it to be very cheap. As is often the case, however, Mesh has surprised us by selling the PC at a reasonable price point, so we were eager to see whether any corners had been cut, or whether the X-treme FX60 lived up to its full potential.

The X-treme FX60 is available direct from Mesh's Web site, with a large number of customisation options.

Design
The X-treme FX60 is housed inside a fairly attractive silver and black chassis. The design is more muted than that of a typical Alienware PC. It won't catch the eye of the boy-racer crowd, but its lack of garish colours and flashing lights means it's less likely to clash with your home decor.

Mesh has equipped the X-treme FX60 with twin optical drives and above these a floppy disc drive -- a strange contrast with the PC's ultra-modern entrails. The base unit also has a pair of front-facing USB ports next to a circular power button and a set of status lights, but there's little else to speak of on the front of the case.

The physical appearance of the PC is heightened thanks to some clever colour coding. The silver highlighting at the front of the case is matched by the accompanying 20-inch widescreen monitor and the Logitech cordless desktop keyboard and optical cordless rechargeable mouse.

You'll need a fair bit of space to install the accompanying Creative T7900 speaker system, as the subwoofer is fairly bulky. The seven wired speakers that accompany it can also be a pain to install, as you'll need to staple cables to walls to avoid your living room, lounge or bedroom looking like spaghetti junction.

Features
The main weapon in the X-treme FX60's arsenal is its AMD Athlon FX-60 dual-core processor. This CPU is currently top of the gaming processor food chain, and will embarrass most other CPUs when performing ordinary desktop applications. It's clocked at a rather modest 2.6GHz, but don't let this fool you -- there is no better all-rounder for consumer PCs.

Mesh has chosen to install this beast of a CPU on top of the proven Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. This isn't the all-singing, all-dancing Gaming edition, but it's a fantastic performer in its own right and well-equipped to boot. Our only gripe is the fact that it uses an active heatsink to cool its chipset, which adds to the overall system noise.

Also joining in the chorus is a pair of Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT graphics cards. Noisy though they are, these are great cards when running solo, and they offer even better performance when running in tandem. Individually they aren't as quick as a 7800 GTX or the more modern 7900 GTX card, but together they're an impressive solution.

Mesh ensures you get the most out of the X-treme FX60 by including a 20-inch Viewsonic widescreen display. This provides images of very high quality, and its native resolution of 1,650x1,050 pixels means you can view a significant number of applications simultaneously, and take advantage of widescreen movie playback. Unfortunately the monitor, like the base unit, lacks a memory card reader. It's upgradeable, or removable if you already have a hi-res monitor, on the Mesh site's configuration page.

The X-treme FX60's sound capabilities easily match its visual prowess. Mesh has included one of the best consumer soundcards available, the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi, alongside the Creative T7900 7.1-channel speaker system. This combination is ideal for enjoying games in surround sound, or for creating your own high-end audio (provided you have appropriate software), so budding music producers should take note.