Mesh Titan X1800 Fire

The key component in the Mesh Titan X1800 Fire is the pair of ATI Radeon X1800XT graphics cards (read a review here) connected in a Crossfire configuration.

This gives it a huge amount of graphics power to drive the 20in Viewsonic VA2012WB and its 1,680 x 1,050 widescreen resolution.

To back up the graphics, Mesh has selected an AMD Athlon 64 dual core X2 4600+ processor.

This can be upgraded to a 4800+ for an extra £70, but will also push the price past the psychological £2,000 mark. An FX-60 upgrade would make it closer to £2,400.

This combination of fast graphics and processor are supported by ATI's Xpress 200 chipset and the Asus A8R-MVP motherboard. Both parts of the chipset sport passive heatsinks.

Mesh has clearly worked hard to balance the cooling requirements of the Titan X1800 Fire while also taking noise reduction into account.

A fan mounted in the side panel of the Chieftec case sits directly over the processor heatsink, while on the back of the case there's a huge, yet quiet, 120mm fan.

AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet power saving feature is enabled and the Bios is set to build the CPU fan speed up once the temperature passes 35°.

During testing, we found the Bios alarm was set to go off when a faulty fan was detected.

This alert then activated at start-up due to the fan being told to remain inactive. The result is when you start your £1,999 PC you have to either press F1 to continue or disable the alarm within the Bios.

While the Titan X1800 Fire is fast and impressive (see the full performance results here), its biggest problem is that it's already out of date since the new Radeon X1900 Crossfire Edition (read a review here) is now available - although we're yet to see a Crossfire PC with two X1900 cards.

To add to these woes, in March ATI will launch its RD580/Radeon Xpress 3200 chipset, which will be used in the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard.

As it stands, the Titan X1800 Fire PC from Mesh offers excellent performance at a good price, but if you're after top-notch graphics performance (and you probably are at this price), you might want to hold of purchasing until a dual -X1900 PC is released.

Benchmarks
Sysmark 2004 SE: 223
3Dmark05: 11,155