MESH Inspection I
MESH Matrix 64 3200+ E-JOYRetail PCs are often segregated into distinct price points. The monetary values of £499, £749, £999, £1249, £1499, and £1999 can often define just what a PC can offer. We now, for example, expect to see DVD-ReWriters the low side of the £1000 barrier. PCs over this mark (and excluding the dreaded VAT, of course) need to showcase considerable power and aplomb. The goalposts are moving in the direction of the consumer, that is, more value can be had now than ever before.
It's clear that MESH has systems to suit almost every budget. A handy on-line spec-it-yourself selection table allows, within reason, a wide-ranging choice of hardware that's known to work together. The consumer could simply choose a pre-configured system that falls in and around each of the figures quoted above. Integrators often attempt to build to a certain selling price, hoping that their final spec. sheet is more attractive to look at than the competitions'. The MESH Matrix 64 3200+ E-JOY weighs in at £1299 excluding VAT and delivery. That kind of money is nearing the top-end sector, so we'd expect real power coupled with a few neat touches.
At this juncture, I'd like to make clear that this isn't a component review of the constituent parts of this PC bundle. We're focussing more on why they've been chosen, their implementation, and overall package attractiveness. As always, the simplest method of demonstrating what's included is in table format.
| System name | MESH Matrix 64 3200+ E-JOY |
| Price | £1299 excluding VAT (£1526 including VAT). £39 + VAT delivery charge |
| Case | MESH Midi Tower Case (black) with 360w MESH-branded PSU |
| CPU | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2GHz) |
| Motherboard | ASUS K8V Deluxe S754 |
| Memory | 512MB Samsung PC3200 CL3 (2 x 256MB) - 1 slot free |
| Hard drive(s) | 2 x 120GB Maxtor 6Y120M0 SATA in RAID0 |
| Optical drive #1 | Sony DW-U10A Multiformat DVD-ReWriter |
| Optical drive #2 | Sony DDU1612 16x DVD-ROM |
| Graphics card | NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128MB VGA / DVI |
| Sound card | Creative Audigy 2 ZS |
| Speakers | Creative Inspire 7.1-T7700 (8-speaker package) |
| Modem | V92 PCI Software |
| Monitor | Viewsonic 18.1 TFT" (VP181b) |
| Keyboard & Mouse | Logitech Internet keyboard and optical mouse, both black |
| Software (Main) | Windows XP Home w/SP1, Microsoft Works |
| Warranty | 3 years - 2 years on-site and 3rd year RTB |
| Other notables | Onboard Gigabit LAN, joystick, games pad and games bundle |
A discussion of the pure hardware merits will be followed by a look the system in the flesh. To that end, we've previously commented upon how impressive a platform the Athlon 64 Clawhammer currently is. An on-die memory controller which is capable of remarkably low-latency access, 1MB of L2 on-chip cache, SSE2 support, and Silicon-On-Insulator technology help to push its performance, albeit with a 2GHz clock speed, to beyond the Barton XP3200's levels in most benchmarks that are considered to be memory-dependant. MESH could equally have chosen a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading goodness and chosen from a whole barrage of i875P and i865PE mainboards. With respect to the chosen CPU at the £1299 price tag and with due consideration of the Athlon 64 3200+ merits, we reckon it's a good a choice as any. The price tag almost prohibits the user of the vastly more expensive FX-51 CPU.
The present choice for Socket-754 motherboards resides with either the VIA K8T800 or NVIDIA nForce3 150 chipsets. SiS is planning to add its own support in the very near future, but for now, an integrator has to decide between the mentioned duo. Our initial look at the S754 chipsets favoured the K8T800 over the nForce3 150 from a features point of view. Both benchmarked within a percentage point or two of each other, so an integrator needs to distinguish between them on the basis of what extra functionality one provides over the other. Ryszard took a comprehensive look at the ASUS K8V Deluxe here and found it to be decent motherboard on which to base a power PC on. The board boasts a clean layout and performance. Ryszard noted, was generally excellent. Another solid choice in a £1299 system.
The Athlon 64 3200+ architecture can be thought of as lacking in bandwidth. Unlike the FX-51, the Clawhammer uses a single-channel memory controller that's ratified to run system RAM at DDR400 speeds. In layman's terms, a single module of DDR400 is the maximum guaranteed speed that the DRAM controller will accept, if run to spec'. MESH decides to use 2 modules of Samsung PC3200 CL3 RAM. Again, with reference to the underlying architecture and DDR speed limitations imposed by using all three DIMM slots concurrently, we feel as if a single 512MB module would have been a better choice. It would have opened up the possibility of adding more RAM at a later date without undue concern. 512MB of system memory is considered adequate for systems well below the £1000 mark. It's a debatable subject, but we'd have liked 1GB in total here. The CPU and graphics card are geared up towards gaming, in that view 1GB is certainly not overkill. MESH hasn't used any low latency or otherwise 'special' RAM to boost benchmarking performance. We're fine with that, assuming it works at specced speeds.
One can never have too much storage, so thinks MESH. The E-JOY is equipped with a nominal 240GB split over 2 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 8MB cache SATA hard drives. Looking at the Time Platina Viper FX as a benchmark, the total storage here is impressive. Now comes a contentious point. The drives are pre-arranged in RAID0 format (striping the drives so that the OS sees them as one and can read / write to each one concurrently). We'd laud such an arrangement normally, but with the chances of disk and OS failure doubled with the lack of redundancy, along with the lack of real-world performance increase from running RAID0 in a home setup, we reckon the disadvantages outweigh the positive points. Why not keep both drives as master on either SATA port ?. They're more than quick enough for most day-to-day tasks and two independent drives, ceteris paribus, should cause fewer warranty claims for MESH. It could also have opted for a single 200GB Maxtor SATA drive and rendered this issue moot.
Most commentators would agree that it is imperative for a midrange or high-end PC to have some form of DVD-ReWriting ability. The price of such units has fallen dramatically over the last quarter, and basic DVD burners are now cropping up in £700 - £800 systems. To appeal to a broad a church as possible, MESH opts for a multi format drive from Sony. The DW-U10A offers DVD-ReWriting at 4x (DVD-R), 2x (DVD-RW), 2.5x (DVD+R & DVD+RW), 32x (CD Read), 24x (CD-R), 10x (CD-RW), and 12x (DVD-ROM read). The supplied DW-U10A needs a firmware upgrade that allows it to write at 4x, which was missing here. The newer DW-14A manages to boost DVD+R write speeds up to 4x. The latter is also cheaper at some e-tailers, selling for around £70 + VAT. The DW-U10A is a decent enough drive, but we can't see why the better '14A was included, especially if MESH buys it in at a similar price. The accompanying 16x Sony DVD-ROM wasn't the quietest of drives. It's din, however, wasn't enough to cause problems on its own. You'll find out why later on.
Perhaps the area most open to debate is the choice of graphics card. For most consumers, does a price of over £1500, once delivered, deserve a slice of high-octane graphics from NVIDIA and ATI's best ?. It's difficult to say. When designing a PC to a certain budget, where do you draw the line ?. Do you focus on the screen and storage more so than on the graphics card, or vice-versa ?. These are hard decisions for a company to make. MESH opts for a vanilla NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128MB video card that sits midrange in NV's lineup. Our review reckoned it to be a classy performer in the sub-£200 market. The simple reason that the presence of this graphics card is questioned is due to ATI's excellent multipurpose Radeon 9800SE All-In-Wonder, which, whilst not offering as much absolute peformance in gaming benchmarks, does present more from a features standpoint. Integrated TV tuner, excellent recording ability and a nifty remote control would make it our choice. That's not to criticise MESH; the FX 5700 Ultra can provide substantial gaming fun, and this PC appears to be biased in that direction.
We're fans of non-onboard sound. Too often an integrator will spice up the specification sheet with a couple of eye-catching components and then attempt to build into a price tag by skimming over other essential features. MESH does absolutely the right thing by using Creative's decent Audigy 2 ZS sound card and the impressive Inspire 7.1-T7700 8-speaker set. We'll skip over the TFT's ability here. It deserves to be evaluated with pictures in tow.
Input devices, or components that the user will be interacting with on a daily basis, we reckon, need to be chosen with special care and attention. All too often, a promising system is severely let-down by the choice of keyboard and mouse. Time has been guilty of this misdemeanour in the past. MESH, however, doesn't fall into this trap. Logitech's black Y-ST39 keyboard gives a reassuring response to every keystroke. The bulk of this review was written using it. It's decently laid out and has a series of useful shortcuts. The matching black mouse, M-BJ58, is a sturdy optical-driven rodent with a firm scrolling wheel. Both peripherals are corded. We'd expect nothing less at this price, though.
This block of text highlights our evaluations of MESH's component selection. Let's now see how it's incorporated into physical form.
