Mesh Xtreme FX60

As far as looks go, the Evesham Axis FX 60 Fireball wins hands down. We’ve seen Evesham use this stylish case a few times before and it never fails to impress. It’s not just aesthetics, though ­ the display panel offers CPU temperature and fan speeds, along with more basic details such as time and date.

The most noticeable internal difference between the two is on the graphics front. Evesham has opted for a single Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX, while Mesh has decided to do things the SLI (scalable link interface) way and use two separate Geforce 7800 GT cards in its Xtreme FX60 system.

Thanks to our benchmarks, the performance difference isn’t hard to spot. The single 7800 GTX in the Evesham is an awesomely powerful card, and the score of 7,967 in 3Dmark05 isn’t to be sniffed at, but the two 7800 GTs in the Mesh combined to produce a far more impressive score of 11,496 in the same test.

As well as supplying double the number of graphics cards, Mesh has also doubled the memory to 2GB of PC3200 Ram.

Both manufacturers have opted for extra-large monitors, which is a wise decision since these PCs are designed to run games and other applications at high resolutions.

Mesh ships the Philips 200W6CS ­ a 20in widescreen model with a native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050. Evesham goes one step further and supplies the excellent 21in NEC LCD2170NX.

Unlike the Philips, this has a standard 4:3 aspect ratio along with a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200. It also costs about £200 more than the Philips.

Sony must be offering some decent bulk-buy deals on its optical drives; both Evesham and Mesh have gone for Sony DVD-Rom and Sony dual-layer DVD-RW drives. Using two separate discs (200GB and 300GB), Mesh supplies a fair bit more hard drive storage space than Evesham’s single 320GB drive.

Software is often an overlooked aspect of a new PC system, but a decent bundle can save you a fair bit of cash. Evesham includes Microsoft Works 8, Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 and Bullguard Internet Security, whereas Mesh limits its bundle to Works 8.5. Both come with Windows XP Home Edition as standard.

Mesh supplies the better of the two warranties: three-year on-site cover as opposed to Evesham’s two-year on-site and one-year return to base.

Although they’re not cheap, both these systems offer good value for money. Mesh decided to concentrate on boosting graphics performance, while Evesham spent more money on a bigger monitor and more feature-rich case.

If you’re looking for super-fast graphics, the Mesh’s SLI offering will no doubt appeal the 2GB Ram and two hard drives also go in its favour. But those craving an extra-large monitor will sway towards the Evesham.

Despite not being a dual-graphics card system, the powerful 7800 GTX should be more than enough for most; you can always add a second at a later stage.

Overall, we feel the Mesh system offers slightly better value for money, but not by much.

Going back to the FX-60 processor, the question has to be asked whether the average Joe really needs a dual processor.

Certainly, if you’re just running basic applications and playing the occasional game, you’d be wasting your money on one of these systems. However, for hardened gamers and those who frequently run multithreaded applications, dual-core facilitates significant performance improvements.

The FX-60 clocked up some decent benchmark scores, and is definitely an improvement on the previous AMD dual-core champion, the X2 4800+. What we would really like to see is a processor based on two 2.8GHz cores, thereby acting like two FX-57 CPUs.

We wait with bated breath to see what AMD, and indeed Intel, have in store for the future.