Interior
MESH keep the interior pretty clean in terms of cable routing with all the major board areas free to breathe and the front chassis fan not blocked off too much by the power cable runs to the graphics boards. Hard disks are mounted with connector ends facing out towards you as you look at it, after taking the side off, and there's good interior access to pretty much everything. However, it's a tight squeeze to remove the X-Fi down in that bottom slot if you ever find the need to take it out, and you definitely need to take out the X1950 card that's directly above it before you do.
Also, check out where the tail end of the second graphics card ends up. It's right over the SATA ports on the mainboard which makes it hard to manipulate if you need to. That's the case with many a mainboard and thus isn't something unique to the MESH configuration we're looking at here, but it stops you getting the most out of the expansion possibilities of the system. There's drive space for a third disk as you can see, but beware the cabling space you'll have and realistically all you can add is something SATA.
The Radeon X1950 boards sit pretty in their slots and the mainboard provides enough space in between them for the top board to pull a good amount of air through its heatsink to then push out the rear of the chassis. The interior could be better, but given the chassis and mainboard choice for the SKU, really the only improvements MESH could make would be in a little better cable routing and general tidying, although that's more down to the limitations inherent in the chassis.
Further, this SKU isn't representative of the latest integration thinking from MESH, with shipping models, we're assured, having cleaner routing, especially with respect to the SATA cabling. Please also note that the X1950 master card was added after MESH had completed initial building of this SKU.
Noise-wise we're mostly impressed. MESH enabled ASUS Q-Fan on the mainboard out-of-the-box to keep the CPU cooler as quiet as possible. We measured some notably high mainboard temperatures due to the passive chipset cooling and limited through-chassis airflow, though, giving us some slight cause for concern when running the system in a hot room. Turning off fan speed controls didn't do much to help those temperatures. No stability issues were encountered however and that includes our multi-hour stress tests, more on which later.
