Mesh XGS PII iQ

A few years ago there was a lot of competition between the two major makers of computer processors, Intel and AMD.

While Intel held (and still holds) the majority of the market share, AMD made a concerted effort to undercut the bigger company on price while matching it on performance.

That battle has abated with both companies now providing good-value processors for the majority of applications, and all programs are equally happy to run on either kind of processor.

One such AMD processor, the Phenom II X4 920, can be found at the heart of this Mesh XGS PII iQ computer. It’s a quad-core device, which means that it has four processing ‘cores’ (think of them as brains) which allows it to do four things at once. That doesn’t make it four times faster than a standard PC, but for some tasks, especially games, photo editing and video editing, the speed increase is considerable.

It’s backed up by a huge 4GB of memory and a better-than-average graphics card, an ATI Radeon HD 4850 model which has 512MB of its own memory. Between them those three components helped the computer to impressive results in our lab tests, both when used for general tasks such as the aforementioned photo-editing, and for games performance. The hard disk is a likewise impressive 750GB model, and there’s a Blu-ray disc drive, which can read but not write the new Blu-ray discs (it can also read and write all CDs and DVDs). There’s also a memory card reader on the front panel, along with the usual complement of USB sockets

The graphics card sends its output to the supplied 26in Iiyama flat-panel monitor, which has an impressive resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels. That allows it to be used to display so-called Full HD movies, which include the movies that can be played using the computer’s Blu-ray reader. Likewise, the six-speaker surround-sound system that comes with the computer comes into its own for films and games.

In order to take full advantage of the 4GB of memory, Mesh has loaded the computer with the 64-bit version of the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system. While this does make best use of the resources, the 64-bit editions of Windows are notorious for not working with older software and hardware, so if you have any programs or devices that you’ll be using with a new computer, check with the maker to ensure they will work with 64-bit Windows. The computer also comes with Microsoft Works 8.5 for office tasks and Cyberlink software for viewing movies.

There’s a one-year return-to-base warranty.

We’ve looked at computers costing under £600 that will provide similar performance for home users, but the addition of Blu-ray and the huge screen make the Mesh Matrix II iQ an impressive choice for fans of films and games.