Mesh Elite IQ 2180 review

If you don't have a lot of money to spend, then it's important to make the most of your cash by choosing a budget PC that's both powerful enough for your current needs and upgradable to cope with your future computing requirements.

One of the best budget PCs we've seen recently was Mesh's £400 6000+ X2 GT.

The Elite IQ 2180 is its successor and also costs £400 including VAT but, unfortunately, it represents a step backwards. Its most immediately noticeable flaw is noise; the processor fan is irritatingly loud, especially in a quiet room.

This is the first PC we've seen at this price to come with 4GB of memory. It's an odd decision, as the 32-bit edition of Vista Home Premium can only use around 3.5GB of this, and 2GB is plenty for most people. This would have left more room in the budget for a processor faster than the 2GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180. It fared well in all our Windows benchmarks, especially our video- and image- editing tests, but the 6000+ X2 GT was faster in every test, thanks to its 3GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor. It managed an overall benchmark score of 202, compared to the Elite's 164.

The Elite isn't well-suited to 3D gaming. Its Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card performed poorly in our gaming benchmarks. Although the 6000+ wasn't powerful enough for the very latest games such as Crysis, it produced fairly smooth frame rates in Call of Duty 2 with reduced graphics settings.

We liked the rich and vibrant colours of the 19in Hannspree monitor, and its 1,440x900-pixel resolution provides plenty of working space. Unfortunately, viewing angles weren't very wide. Colour accuracy suffered and images took on a pink tint unless we were sitting directly in front of the display.

Both the Elite and the 6000+ share the same black and silver case, so it's unsurprising that the Elite has the same lack of expansion options as its predecessor. There's only one empty bay for another hard disk and one spare bay for another optical drive, so you'll have to choose any internal storage upgrades carefully. Although there are two empty PCI slots and a free PCI Express x1 slot for adding peripherals such as a TV tuner, one of the PCI slots is partially obstructed by the graphics card's cooling fan.

The Elite IQ 2180 isn't a very well-rounded PC. The extra RAM isn't a wise choice, as the 6000+ X2 GT is a faster PC. Meanwhile, there are still limited expansion options and the processor fan is noisy. If you need a budget PC then you should buy the 6000+ X2 GT instead.