Features

The Midi-Tower case from Mesh has undergone a complete overhaul, both in terms of looks and manufacturing design. It's one hell of a sturdy case and has become somewhat heavier than it was. Although some see this as a disadvantage, we were very impressed with the engineering aspects of the case, and as far as looks go, it really comes down to individual taste, and it's your call.

Access to the case couldn't be simpler, supplied with it's own key to get access to the insides, this really does make it tool free, no messing around with screws or the fear of losing any. We would strongly recommend you keep the spare key somewhere safe in case you misplace the first.

Once the key is turned the side panel of the case slides away without any force and can be removed from it's original housing should you wish to remove it completely. Once inside the cables are neatly tied back with sufficient tolerance to allow for future upgrades to be carried out without the need of having taken a degree course in origami to get them back to it's original state. Again, Mesh is clearly listening to its customer by making improvements in areas that others simply ignore or don't have an eye for detail.

A single 3.5" bay houses the 1.44Mb Floppy disk drive and directly beneath this is the three 5.25" bays one of which houses the Pioneer DVD 40 x drive, leaving two spare 5.25" bays, in addition to these there are three 3.5" bays internally, of which one houses the Maxtor DiamondMax VL 30 33073H4 30Gb ATA/66 hard disk drive being Maxtor's value line, the other two are spare and can be utilised for future hard disk upgrades. The hard disk choice is a little strange considering Mesh's reputation for providing leading edge products, as the ATA/100 alternative would have cost approximately another £5-£10 and would have done the trick. The motherboard supports ATA/100 and having carried out a performance comparison between ATA/66 and ATA/100 we would strongly recommend paying the difference in price to secure an ATA/100 drive. The motherboard supplied with the system is the ASUS A7V manufactured by ASUSTEK COMPUTER INC. based in Taiwan. The ASUS A7V is one of the finest motherboards currently available, having just completed a Head to Head labs review on motherboards in our previous labs, and is based on the popular VIA KT133 chipset solution, supporting a 200MHz FSB and the Promise ATA/100 controller onboard, at the heart of the motherboard beats the elegant AMD Duron 750MHz processor complete with a sophisticated heatsink/fan combination for cooling the processor, and is the flagship in AMD value range of processors. We were highly impressed with it's showing in our labs test earlier this month, this is supported by 128MB PC100 SDRAM manufactured by Hyundai, and again our advice is exactly the same as the hard disk scenario, upgrade to PC133 the price difference should be nil. The Video and Monitor combination is superb; Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB DDR AGP Video card feeds to the Sony 17" CPD-E200E monitor which supports an Aperture Grille Pitch of 0.24-0.25mm and which had no problems dealing with our 1024 x 768 @ 85Hz test resolution, the monitor support a top resolution of 1280 x 1024 at a refresh rate of 81Hz. An internal Diamond Supraexpress 56i V Pro modem with V90 will, more than meet your communication needs; the sound combination is by Creative in the form of a Sound Blaster PCI 128 and the Teac Powermax 80 speakers with an adequate sound reproduction for s system of this class. Ms Works Suite 2000 includes the popular Word 2000; the operating system being the popular Windows 98 SE and not Windows Me as we might have expected rounds off the software offering.

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