Internal thoughts, and other musings
Opening up and taking a look inside is simply a matter of unclipping one side and removing the holding panel. The panel has a fan built into it that connects to a header on the motherboard. The annoying feature, as you can see above, is that removing the panel, should you need to, also forces the fan's cable to be removed, and it's painfully frustrating to put it back into place. There must surely be a simpler method; a simple extension, perhaps?. Expansion-wise, there's room for another couple of hard drives next to the 300GB Maxtor model specified by MESH, and we'd liked to have seen an intake fan at the very front of the case, thereby balancing the airflow inside the chassis.
Powering such a powerful system is a HEC 550W PSU that was pretty quiet in use. ASUS' A8R-MVP Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition motherboard is used to provide the CrossFire compatibility we referred to on the previous page. It's a mix of ATI RD480 northbridge and ULi 1575 southbridge, one that supports SATA2 and varying flavours of RAID, should you wish to add a second or third hard drive yourself. 1GByte of Samsung Original DDR400 is arranged in 2 512MByte modules and correctly run in dual-channel mode. MESH has chosen AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4600+ dual-core CPU to power the X1800 Fire system. Clocking in at 2.4GHz and sporting 512KB of L2 cache per core, it seems a little underpowered in relation to the graphics cards, although once set to the Philips TFT's 1600x1200 resolution, modern gaming engines should become GPU-limited to a greater degree.
The two double-height ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB cards (Master and standard) take up much of the expansion space provided by the motherboard which 5.1-channel high-definition sound. MESH, therefore, includes Creative's excellent X-Fi ExtremeMusic soundcard, situated to the very left. Run through the accompanying Creative speakers, system audio is the bare minimum of what we'd expect on a £2,000 machine.
Warranty, support, and upgrades
MESH offers a 3-year warranty with the Titan system. The first two years are onsite support, followed by back to base for the final year. That's what we'd expect from a £2000 system, really. You're also offered the chance to upgrade the warranty to a 3-year onsite: it'll cost you an additional £29 including VAT. MESH, in keeping with most system integrators, uses a national-rate telephone number as your first point of contact. The warranty also extends to a lifetime (for the system) of telephone-based support, again at the national-rate number. A system restore CD is also included that puts the Titan back into factory specification, software-wise, should matters go awry.
In addition to Microsoft's XP Home SP2, MESH bundles in MS' Works 8.5, a whole host of CyberLink-based software that's usually provided with ASUS motherboards, and a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office XP. Given that the Titan X1800 Fire is a system designed to play the latest games with ease, a bundled triple-A gaming title would have been pertinent.
If the basic specification isn't quite powerful enough, MESH offers CPU upgrades to Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 'FX-60 for £75+VAT and £275+VAT, respectively. RAM can be upgraded to 2GBytes for an addition £75+VAT, and the soundcard to the X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS for the same amount. Gamers looking for extra hardware can add a Saitek Cyborg Evo joystick and Logitech feedback steering wheel for £55+VAT.
General observations
The use of two standard ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB cards in pre-configured CrossFire mode was always going to impact upon the relative quietness of the system. When taxed under sustained 3D load, both cards' fans spin at high enough RPMs to make them clearly noticeable over background noise. There's two solutions to this problem. The first is a customised cooling design that's better than the reference design. The second is the use of more cards-directed cooling that limits the speed of the temperature-controlled fans. Take your pick, they'll both work.
If we were to build it ourselves, we'd add a matching black TFT and a multicard reader to the chassis. Apart from that, MESH has most aspects covered.
Value for money
We scoured the UK etailers for the best prices on the hardware and software that MESH provides with its Titan X1800 Fire system. Once you factor in the combined price of just the CPU and graphics cards, totalling some £1200, and further account for the remaining hardware and bundle, we weren't able to match MESH's £1999.99 asking price, and our 'self-build' would exclude warranty support. In that respect, MESH's price is attractive.
