Mesh XGS PII 955CS review

Mesh's XGS PII 955CS has a 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor, the fastest in AMD's current range, and a huge 8GB of memory.

This combination gives excellent performance at a reasonable price. The Overall score of 112 in our application benchmarks was 12 per cent quicker than our reference PC. Most users won't make full use of all that memory, but those editing HD video will certainly feel the benefits. If you need even more power, the Black Edition processor gives plenty of overclocking options.

The ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card helped the 955CS to a high frame rate of 54.8fps in Call of Duty 4 and 25.1fps on the challenging Crysis test. It's easy to boost frame rates in Crysis by reducing the anti-aliasing setting. We've seen more powerful cards in £800 PCs before, but unless you're a serious gamer the HD 4770 is a good choice, which is why it's our current Best Buy.

All this impressive hardware is slotted into Mesh's latest own-brand chassis. The black-and-red case looks rather snazzy, and should please anyone who likes their PC to stand out. Inside, there's a 1TB hard disk for storage, and plenty of room to install extra drives. We liked the convenient USB, eSATA, FireWire and audio ports mounted above the front fascia. It's well built, but although it has vibration-dampening hard disk caddies, there's no other sound-proofing. This makes it a bit noisy when compared to systems with sound-proofed cases such as Mesh's award-winning Matrix II 940CS. It's also power-hungry, consuming 148W when simply idling.

The Asus M4A79 Pro motherboard is well designed, with everything sensibly laid out. With the graphics card in place, only one of the two PCI-E x1 slots is available. However, there are three PCI slots, too, so you shouldn't have any trouble adding expansion cards.

Logitech's Deluxe 660 cordless keyboard and mouse set mean you aren't tied to your PC with cables. They work well enough, but the keyboard feels somewhat spongy. The 22in widescreen Iiyama ProLite E2208HDS monitor is outstanding, with a fast 2ms response time, a 1,920x1,080 resolution and great image quality. Colour saturation wasn't as vivid as we've seen from some screens, but this is an excellent display whether you want to play games, watch HD movies or work with multiple applications.

The XGS PII 955CS is fantastic value. It comes with more processor power and RAM than any similarly priced system we've seen. The ATI Radeon HD 4770's performance isn't powerful enough to excite serious gamers, but it's still quick enough to handle the latest games. The XGS PII 955CS is a great choice for those wanting a really powerful PC. It wins our Best Buy award.

Author: Kat Orphanides