Mesh Elite E6600 CB review

We asked Mesh to provide us with a powerful gaming PC for £999 and the Elite E6600 is the result.

From the outside, you'd be hard pressed to tell that it's a gaming PC as it's shod in Mesh's usual beefy case and accompanied by a 19in Sony monitor and a bog-standard Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. Our first complaint comes courtesy of the Logitech kit as it's cheap, plasticky and not particularly suitable for gaming at all. If you're serious about playing games, you'd be far better off with a quality wired mouse and keyboard that's been built to withstand the thump and click of over-enthusiastic games players.

Speed demon

The keyboard and mouse may have set our teeth on edge, but thankfully the rest of the specification was good enough to calm us down a little. Mesh has chosen a Core 2 Duo processor to power the Elite, specifically the E6600 model. The E6600 is a stonking processor - with its two cores barrelling along at a heady 2.4GHz, it's a sensibly priced powerhouse, which looks right at home in a gaming PC. Some modern computer games resolutely refuse to run entirely smoothly without at very least 1GB of RAM at their disposal, and so the 2GB of 533MHz DDR2 RAM in the Mesh are a sensible precaution.

As you'd expect from such a combination, the Mesh isn't left wanting for speed in any situation. Our application benchmarks test a system's ability to cope with audio and video encoding, while image editing and running a couple of background tasks at the same time. The Mesh was left utterly unphased and scored a blindingly quick 183%.

Looking good

While this amount of power is enough to take on any standard Windows application, it's gaming that we're really interested in and happily the Mesh didn't disappoint us. The GeForce 7900GT graphics card isn't top of the range, nor particularly fancy in any respect, but its still more than powerful enough to cope with our Call of Duty 2 benchmark, which it dismissed with a score of 141%. That's enough power to handle any game currently on the market and at high detail settings too. And as the Elite is equipped with an SLI-ready motherboard, you can always add another 7900GT further down the line. We added one we had in our labs and the Elite's score shot up to 193%.

The choice of monitor is a good one for a couple of reasons. The Sony 19in model has a glossy screen covering, which while reflective under bright lights, gives a punchier image than traditional matte screens for movies and games. Image quality was good across the board and contrast was particularly impressive with lots of fine detail evident, even in the darkest corners of our test images. The native resolution of 1280 x 1024 is standard fare for a 19in monitor, but it means the single 7900GT graphics card won't run out of oomph, even when demanding games like F.E.A.R or Call of Duty 2 are cranked up to eye-watering detail settings.

Sounding off

Game and movie soundtracks are ably taken care of by a set of Creative T7900 speakers. The T7900s are a 7.1 set and while they'll threaten to turn even the neatest rooms into a spaghetti junction of cables, they have enough oomph to power through the most hectic of soundtracks.

The Mesh is a powerful gaming PC at a sensible price. It offers a good specification, upgradeability and a quality warranty, but it's not without rivals. If you're on a tight budget take a look at the Gladiator Praetorian 6300GT reviewed on page 69 - if you don't need a monitor, keyboard or speakers, £599 can buy you more gaming prowess than even the mighty Mesh can muster.