Thoughts, HEXUS.awards and HEXUS.right2reply
For a £1699+VAT (~USD$3200, ~MYR11,900, ~€2500) full system it's right to expect pretty much perfection. It's a significant chunk of money in almost anyone's eyes, so the PC it buys you should aspire to do Great Things™ but it's true to say that the MESH Elite Fire X1950 we looked at fell a little short in a few areas. While some of it is undoubtedly attributable to the pre-production nature of the review sample, and as such we can mostly assume the foibles will disappear before mass production, but we'd need to see a full-production unit to be sure.Taking the sample at face value we see that performance was occasionally unpredictable, software configuration was awry in a few places, interior temperatures were quite high and the monitor offered could be better.
We're no fans of the aesthetics either, and your particular author constantly wonders why much, much better chassis aren't rolled out to customers spending so much money. It looks like a £500 Dell, not a ~£1700 monster system. The base specification could do with some work too, for the money. Why no integrated media reader in the floppy drive, or even one supplied tethered to a USB2.0 cable? Why aren't both optical drives dual-layer DVD burners? Both are cheap additions to any system that a prospective owner would appreciate the effort on, and we argue any PC vendor should take a hit on margins for the detailing of what's absolutely a high-end system.
All that said, providing MESH take cognisance of the points we've raised about software configuration and do ship their production systems configured as claimed -- which in truth we're confident they will -- then there's the simple fact that to buy the hardware separately at e-tail, even if you could assemble it yourself, would certainly result in a higher price than you'd give MESH.
Additionally you wouldn't have anything approaching the three-year on-site warranty, parts and labour included by MESH or the high priority customer care and technical advice provided on its MESH.care@HEXUS support forums.
We believe that these factors alone make the system more than worthy of your considering in a serious way. Value for money is a powerful incentive to purchase and the MESH Elite Fire X1950 has good merit in that respect.
To sum up, you can't make it less ugly, but you can choose to spend your money on a better monitor, in our opinion, and take good advantage of the value for money in the base unit and limited bundled accessories, and the fairly outstanding warranty. MESH's buying power therefore pulls them through this review, but not without something for their spec. team and integrators to think about when concocting their next high-end SKU, whether that's a pre-production review sample or the example a customer will be sold and shipped.
As a very personal aside and as a user of a recently self-bought and self-assembled high-end PC, it's eternally maddening to see a ~£1700 base unit with such a spec. housed in such a basic-looking chassis. So I point MESH at the little things a user spending such money should get time, money and effort spent on before it hits their desks and does what they want it to.
HEXUS.certification
MESH Elite Fire X1950
HEXUS Awards
For the money, you can't do better at e-tail building it yourself, so the system is fully deserving of the coveted HEXUS 'Good Value' award.
MESH Elite Fire X1950
HEXUS Where2Buy
The MESH Elite Fire X1950 is now available to order from MESH Computers.
