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Mesh Pegasus A8 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £550
inc VAT

It doesn't have the fastest CPU or GPU, but the Pegasus A8's SSD provides great Windows performance

Specifications

3.0GHz AMD A8-3870K Black Edition, 4GB RAM, N/A display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

You may have heard of Mesh before, but the long-running PC manufacturer actually went into administration and ceased trading last year. Now it has been reborn, a new company under the same name, and this is the first PC we’ve seen from it. As with any new company, we’d recommend caution when buying, but we’ve received no complaints concerning it to date.

The Mesh Pegasus A8 is an AMD-based PC with a quad-core A8-3870K Black Edition processor running at 3GHz and a dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6770 graphics card. Its stand-out feature is the 60GB solid-state drive (SSD) that’s configured as a Windows boot disk, along with a 500GB hard disk for general storage.

Mesh Pegasus A8

The SSD makes Windows boot up more quickly and speeds up the system in general. It has around 36GB of free space, even though Windows is installed on it, which means you could install a few favourite applications or games on it to get better performance. SSDs are normally the preserve of much more expensive PCs, so we were worried that maybe Mesh had used a cheap SSD that might not present any performance advantage over a normal disk, but Dirt 3 loaded almost three seconds faster in our tests when installed on the SSD than it did when installed on the hard disk (16s versus 18.9s).

Its performance, however, lagged quite a way behind the Intel Core i5 chips we’re used to seeing in PCs. An overall score of 73 makes the Pegasus A8 about as fast as a high-end laptop. It’s still capable of running Office applications smoothly, but more intensive tasks such as video encoding or heavy photo editing will start to slow things down. The good thing is that the SSD’s quick file operations will counter-balance this performance shortfall.

Mesh Pegasus A8

There’s an integrated graphics chip on the A8 processor, but it’s pretty much surplus to requirements because of the dedicated graphics card. Sadly, the Radeon HD 6770 is too powerful to couple with the onboard graphics in Hybrid CrossFireX mode, but it isn’t powerful enough to deliver outstanding gaming performance. In Dirt 3, it managed a playable 36fps, but in Crysis 2 the frame rate dropped to 15.4fps. We had to reduce settings to get a playable frame rate of 38fps, which turned off most of the pretty effects.

We liked the Pegasus A8’s imposing Cooler Master case because it has plenty of room inside. There are plenty of drive bays, including two external bays of each type, although there are only three free SATA3 headers on the Pegasus A8’s microATX motherboard. Sadly, it’s short on expansion slots too. It has free PCI and PCI-E x1 slots, but both are obscured by the graphics card. Mesh has really missed a trick by not installing the card in the bottom PCI-E x16 slot, which would’ve freed up the other slots.

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Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Processor AMD A8-3870K Black Edition
Processor external bus 100MHz (HyperTransport)
Processor multiplier x30
Processor clock speed 3.0GHz
Processor socket Socket FM1
Memory 4
Memory type DDR3
Maximum memory 64GB
Motherboard Asustek F1A75-M
Motherboard chipset AMD A75

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 2/6
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/0
eSATA ports (front/rear) 0/0
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support none

Internal Expansion

Case tower
PCI-E x1 slots (free) 1 (0)
PCI-E x16 slots (free) 2 (1)
Free Serial ATA ports 3
Free memory slots 3
Free 3.5in drive bays 5

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) Corsair F60 + Seagate Barracuda (ST500DM002)
Interface SATA3 + SATA2
Total storage capacity 560GB

Graphics

Graphics card(s) 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6770
Graphics/video ports VGA, DVI, HDMI

Sound

Sound Realtek HD Audio
Sound outputs 7.1 line out, optical S/PDIF out
Speakers none

Removable Drives

Supported memory cards none
Optical drive type(s) DVD+/-RW +/-DL

Display

Screen model none
Native resolution N/A
Screen inputs N/A

Other Hardware

Keyboard N/A
Mouse N/A

Software

Software included Microsoft Office 2010 Starter
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Operating system restore option Windows disc

Buying Information

Warranty three years RTB (three months collect and return)
Price £550
Details www.meshcomputers.com

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