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The Mesh Elite 3770K CS has one of the best cases we’ve seen from an OEM recently. One of Cooler Master’s Silencio range, the case has sound-deadening pads on its side panels so that the PC only emits a low hum when operating. This is further aided by the liquid cooling system. The drive bays don’t have dampening screws, which you’d normally expect from a sound-insulated case, but we didn’t have any trouble with rattling hard disks. The entire system is very neatly laid out.
The system disk is a 120GB SSD, so you get fast boot times and enough space to install programs. For data, there’s a 2TB HDD. There are currently three 31/2in drive bays in the system, but Mesh ships the PC with an optional second drive cage with space for three more. Two of the installed bays are occupied by a memory card reader and the 2TB drive. The SSD is installed at the base of the case. There are also three 51/4in drive bays, one of which houses a DVD-RW drive.
Both the optical drive and the card reader are located behind a front flap. The reader provides an extra USB port and support for formats such as MicroSD, CompactFlash II and mobile phone SIMs. The latter is particularly useful if you want to use SIM-reading software to make quick and easy backups of your phone’s SIM. Below are two USB ports, the usual 3.5mm audio ports and a second SD card reader. One of the USB ports is USB3, but it only works via a pass-through wire to one of the rear USB ports.
The Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard is a familiar budget board with six SATA ports. Three are in use here, including both the SATA3 ports. The motherboard also has three PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots, but one of these is blocked by the graphics card and the other is occupied by an 802.11n Wi-Fi card. There’s a spare PCI-E x16 slot, though. It actually runs at x4 and can handle any x1 or x4 card. Two of the motherboard’s four memory slots are occupied by 1,600MHz 4GB memory modules. 8GB of RAM is plenty for all but the most demanding of multimedia applications, but there’s space to add more.
The processor is an Intel Core i7-3770K, overclocked to 4.6GHz. It’s massively powerful, achieving an overall score of 146 in our benchmark tests. Needless to say, it’ll run anything. The graphics card is a 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7850. It produced an average frame rate of 25.7fps in Crysis 2 at the highest quality, but a Dirt3 frame rate of 64fps at Ultra quality proves that this card can handle any modern title at reasonably high settings.
At the back of the PC are six USB ports, (two are USB3), a PS/2 port for a mouse or keyboard, a Gigabit Ethernet port and surround sound outputs in the form of both optical S/PDIF and 3.5mm jacks.
The mouse and keyboard that come with the system are a wireless Logitech set. The keyboard’s a little spongy and the mouse is a bit on the small side, but both are fairly comfortable to use. The supplied Ilyama ProLite E2473HDS monitor is excellent. It has a matt finish, two HDMI inputs and DVI and VGA ports.
Like many PCs at this price, this is an unquestionably powerful computer, but the graphics card’s a little disappointing. You’ll get better gaming performance from the Wired2Fire Diablo GTX.
