Mesh Elite Voyager CS review

Mesh’s Elite Voyager CS edition is about as compact as desktop PCs come. It has a smaller footprint than most tower cases so can easily be tucked away on a desk or near a TV, depending on how you plan on using it. It also has built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which is a handy addition for those with slightly awkward home networks.  It’s also pretty short at just 290mm high so the top will be in easy reach if you store paperwork, coffee cups and desk toys on it

The Corsair Obsidian 250D is an expensive case and, while it looks great from the outside, it doesn’t lend itself to particularly tidy PC builds. This is a shame, because there’s a window on the top of the case that allows you to look at the handiwork of the PC builder, but because of a lack of cable gutters and vanity panels, all the cables used in the build are visible and look a bit messy.

The front of the case has two USB3 ports although, slightly annoyingly, they’re mounted upside down. At the rear, the motherboard has four more USB3 ports and a further two USB connectors alongside six 3.5mm audio connectors, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, the aforementioned wireless receivers and an S/PDIF audio connector. There are also three video output ports with DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort all represented.

While it’s not the quietest PC we’ve tested, it’s not particularly noisy and things don’t ramp up at all even when the PC is under load. Handling your processing demands is dual-core 3.6GHz Intel Core i3-4160 processor paired with 8GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM. It performed admirably in our benchmarking tests, with a score of 91 in the image-editing test hinting at nippy single-core performance in basic tasks. Scores of 61 and 48 in the video processing and multitasking tests respectively are pleasing, too, although we can’t help but feel that perhaps cheap quad-core chip from AMD could have lead to better overall performance

We had performance issues brought on by the pre-installed BullGuard Security suite. Until we uninstalled it, our review PC was a bit stuttery but, more irritatingly, constantly hamstrung but software that is laughably overzealous in which programs it blocks from accessing the internet. For example, it asked us whether we wanted Internet Explorer to be allowed to access the network – twice. Aside from this, Mesh hasn’t installed any other bloatware on the PC.