Mesh Dynamo 7800GTX CSX review

Powerful notebooks tend to come in large cases, and Mesh's Dynamo 7800GTX is no exception. While its 4.3kg weight and large size limit this notebook's portability, it means there's plenty of room for top-end components.

First, there's the 17.1" widescreen display, which has a massive 1,680x1,050 resolution. This has plenty of room for multiple applications or at least more complicated ones, such as large spreadsheets.

It's a very good display, too. It produced excellent results in all our tests, including a very bright, clean white. The screen's gloss coating increases colour saturation and makes dark tones look deep and inky. However, using the Dynamo 7800GTX outside could be problematic due to screen reflections.

With a screen this good, it's nice to have a graphics card that can use it properly. Mesh has fitted a 256MB nVidia GeForce Go 7800 GTX graphics chipset. This gives the Dynamo extraordinary 3D performance, matching up well with our brand new benchmark reference scores. It stormed through the standard notebook Doom 3 test with a score of 91.0fps. We ran our tough Call of Duty 2 test too, where it scored 28.8fps, matching our reference PC again. By turning down some of the graphical effects, you can even run games at the display's huge native resolution, while the widescreen aspect ratio makes up-to-date games seem more cinematic.

Although the touch pad provided is accurate and useful for day-to-day tasks, connecting a mouse is essential for playing games. The keyboard is a good size, with a number pad on the right. The keys are springy and firm and will please those who do a lot of typing. The large chassis provides a wide range of ports, including four USB2 ports and a memory card reader with support for SD, MMC and MS cards.

Inside the chassis is a 1.86GHz Intel Centrino 750 processor and 1GB of RAM, which produced a healthy score in our new 2D benchmarks. The Dynamo's performance comes mainly from its generous amount of memory, which helped it make short work of our memory-intensive image test. It also has a big 80GB hard disk.

The Dynamo 7800 GTX costs around £60 less than Rock's similar Xtreme CT 2.0GHz, which we reviewed in What's New, Shopper February 2006; it has a slightly slower processor, but a slightly larger hard disk. It's hard to choose between them, but we'd opt for Rock's slightly faster processor, which will help when you're playing the latest games.

Author: Seth Barton