Mesh Elite 96VGT+ review

Of the three £600 PCs here, the Elite 96VGT+ has the toughest-looking case, with plenty of thick metal inside and out.

Like RL Supplies' £600 PC, it has plenty of room for upgrades, with three free optical drive bays and room for a couple of extra hard disks. There are two free PCI Express x1 slots, but one of the PCI slots will restrict airflow to the graphics card's cooling fan and the other contains a hybrid analogue and digital TV tuner card.

Windows Vista Home Premium's Media Center application will come in handy when using the TV tuner, as it lets you watch and record TV. Sadly, you can't view one channel while recording another.

The 96VGT+'s monitor is the only 22in model in the £600 group, and provides plenty of space for watching TV and movies. The screen's 1,680x1,00 resolution also gives you more room for Windows applications than the 1,440x900 models that come with the other systems. A higher resolution is useful for tasks where you need a lot of space, such as image editing, and the monitor's quality is certainly good enough to display photos accurately. Colours are vibrant and there is little graininess, but blacks appear lighter towards the bottom of the display and the screen has a slight pink cast. The RL Supplies PC's monitor is superior.

The Elite 96VGT+ has an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 processor. This has half the cache of the E8600 and E8400 chips in the PC Nextday and RL Supplies PCs, and a much slower 2.3GHz clock speed. Even with its 4GB of RAM, the slower processor meant it was easily the slowest PC in the group in PCMark Vantage, with a score of 4,260. Its Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT is a reasonable budget graphics card and was capable of playing Crysis at a smooth 39fps at the monitor's native resolution, but only when we reduced detail settings to medium and turned off anti-aliasing.

Mesh's Elite 96VGT+ is a good all-round PC with a large monitor, a TV card and room for expansion. If you're not planning on doing any processor-intensive tasks such as video encoding, it would make a fine home PC.