MESH Elite Fire X1950
Specification
| Mesh Elite Fire X1950 | |
|---|---|
| Case | Mesh |
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.67GHz, 10.0 x 266, 4MiB L2, LGA775) |
| Mainboard | ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (Intel i975X + ICH7R) |
| Memory | OCZ OCZ2N9002GK PC2-7200 (2 x 1GiB) 4-4-4-15 @ DDR2-890 |
| Hard Disks | 2 x 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA2 (6V300FO) |
| Display | ViewSonic VP2030B |
| Graphics Hardware | ATI Radeon X1950 CrossFire Edition 512MiB ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MiB |
| Optical Drives | Sony AW-G170A Sony DDU1615 |
| Sound Hardware | Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Music |
| Speakers | Creative Inspire T7900 7.1 |
| Modem | None |
| Networking Hardware | 2 x Marvell 88E8053 GigE LOM |
| I/O Ports | 6 x USB2.0 (4 rear, 2 front), 1 x Firewire 400 (rear), 2 x GigE Ethernet (rear) eSATA (rear), PS/2 (rear), coax and Toslink digital audio output (rear) 8-channel analogue audio (rear), serial (rear), Wi-Fi aerial (rear) |
| Operating System | Windows XP Home |
| Additional Software | Microsoft Works 8.5, 60-day trial of Microsoft Office |
| PSU | 550W |
| Included Warranty | MESH Premiere; 3yr on-site, parts and labour |
| Price | £1699 + VAT £1399 + VAT without monitor £34 + VAT standard delivery charge |
| Others | Logitech cordless keyboard and rechargeable cordless mouse (shipping models) |
Compared to the MESH Elite Extreme SLI, the MESH Elite Fire X1950 doesn't give up much and certainly betters it in terms of the graphics subsystem. Using the ASUS P5W DH Deluxe Wi-Fi Edition as a base, the Fire X1950 gets faster modules than the Extreme SLI, but the cheaper and 266MHz slower Core 2 Duo E6700, two 300GB disks instead of one 500GB, and an X-Fi Xtreme Music instead of an X-Fi Fata1ity FPS.
However because of the mainboard you get three Ethernet networking interfaces, two of them GigE wired and on PCI Express no less, and one 802.11g-compliant Wi-Fi interface. The two 300GB disks aren't joined in any RAID fashion, giving you 600GB of usable space across two configured volumes spanning the entirety of each disk.
eSATA lets you use external SATA disk enclosures which are catching on in a big way as a method for adding storage without opening up your chassis, and there's the usual MESH bundled keyboard and software. The ViewSonic monitor is a 20.1" model that's reviewed well elsewhere on the world wide interwebnet, but we're not sure it's worth the £300 + VAT that MESH seem to want for it (even though it of course costs more at general retail!) and at 1600x1200, isn't widescreen or ideally suited to the graphics power supplied.
Microsoft Windows XP Home gets the OS nod, supplanting Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2005 as you'll find in the Extreme SLI. MESH's Premiere warranty covers you for 3 years on-site, including parts and labour, which rocks.
Spec Summary
On paper you've got one hell of a PC. The definite highlights are the Radeon X1950 graphics boards in CrossFire configuration and the Core 2 Duo E6700, ably assisted by plenty of memory and a goodly chunk of disk space which offers up more redundancy than with a single disk, despite not being paired in RAID. The interesting thing performance wise when we compare to the Extreme SLI will be to see how far away the Fire X1950's E6700 is from the X6800 in the Extreme, and just how CrossFire X1950s do against SLI 7900 GTXs. We can't wait.But before that we've got to check out the Fire X1950 in pictures.
