MESH inspection
MESH uses a well-constructed NZXT HUSH part-aluminium chassis for the £649 machine, and it's a slice or two above what we'd expect at this price-point. With easily-accessible power and reset buttons and a cool blue light running up one side when switched on, it makes for a good-looking machine.
The non-lockable door swings to the right and reveals an intake 120mm fan at the bottom, which also lights up blue; a multi-card reader in the middle; and multi-format DVD ReWriter at the top. It won't be long before Blu-ray drives become cheap enough to be ubiquitous on mid-range machines.
There's a single FireWire400, dual audio and twin USB ports on the
right-hand side of the HUSH, in addition to the one built into the
reader, so
front-facing connectivity is good.
More USB ports, eSATA, FireWire, Gigabit LAN, and both optical and coaxial S/PDIF make up a useful I/O section that's to the left of a 120mm exhaust fan.
The single hard drive, 1TB in size and featuring a 32MB cache, is correctly configured in AHCI mode and cooled by the intake fan. Turn-and-click securing means that removing any drive is easy enough, and there's room for a further four 3.5in and three 5.25in devices.
The guts of the system are all AMD and, as far as can be, are forward-looking. The ASUS M4A79-T is an AM3 CPU-supporting motherboard, and MESH duly occupies the socket with a dual-core Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition chip that's clocked in at 3.1GHz and features 6MB of L2 cache. It's cooled by a low-profile heatsink with a 92mm fan that spins up to a somewhat noisy 2,400rpm when under load. The chip is backed up by 4GB of dual-channel DDR3 RAM operating at 1,333MHz.
Given how relatively cheap triple- and quad-core chips have become of late - Phenom II X4 955 BE is now sub-£150 - we're a little concerned that the Matrix II may fall foul of users who engage in heavy multi-tasking.