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You may have heard of Mesh before, but the long-running PC manufacturer actually went into administration and ceased trading last year. Now it has been reborn, a new company under the same name, and this is the first PC we’ve seen from it. As with any new company, we’d recommend caution when buying, but we’ve received no complaints concerning it to date.
The Mesh Pegasus A8 is an AMD-based PC with a quad-core A8-3870K Black Edition processor running at 3GHz and a dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6770 graphics card. Its stand-out feature is the 60GB solid-state drive (SSD) that’s configured as a Windows boot disk, along with a 500GB hard disk for general storage.
The SSD makes Windows boot up more quickly and speeds up the system in general. It has around 36GB of free space, even though Windows is installed on it, which means you could install a few favourite applications or games on it to get better performance. SSDs are normally the preserve of much more expensive PCs, so we were worried that maybe Mesh had used a cheap SSD that might not present any performance advantage over a normal disk, but Dirt 3 loaded almost three seconds faster in our tests when installed on the SSD than it did when installed on the hard disk (16s versus 18.9s).
Its performance, however, lagged quite a way behind the Intel Core i5 chips we’re used to seeing in PCs. An overall score of 73 makes the Pegasus A8 about as fast as a high-end laptop. It’s still capable of running Office applications smoothly, but more intensive tasks such as video encoding or heavy photo editing will start to slow things down. The good thing is that the SSD’s quick file operations will counter-balance this performance shortfall.
There’s an integrated graphics chip on the A8 processor, but it’s pretty much surplus to requirements because of the dedicated graphics card. Sadly, the Radeon HD 6770 is too powerful to couple with the onboard graphics in Hybrid CrossFireX mode, but it isn’t powerful enough to deliver outstanding gaming performance. In Dirt 3, it managed a playable 36fps, but in Crysis 2 the frame rate dropped to 15.4fps. We had to reduce settings to get a playable frame rate of 38fps, which turned off most of the pretty effects.
We liked the Pegasus A8’s imposing Cooler Master case because it has plenty of room inside. There are plenty of drive bays, including two external bays of each type, although there are only three free SATA3 headers on the Pegasus A8’s microATX motherboard. Sadly, it’s short on expansion slots too. It has free PCI and PCI-E x1 slots, but both are obscured by the graphics card. Mesh has really missed a trick by not installing the card in the bottom PCI-E x16 slot, which would’ve freed up the other slots.
Its 450W Powercool modular power supply provides ample juice for the installed components, but if you decide to add another graphics card or replace it with a more powerful one, an upgrade would be required. The Pegasus A8’s 4GB of RAM is fitted as a single DIMM, leaving three free slots, which provides plenty of scope for RAM upgrades. Externally, you get a total of four USB3 ports and four USB2 ports, and audio buffs will be happy with its six 3.5mm ports and optical S/PDIF output.
If you plan on connecting the Pegasus A8 to an HDMI-equipped monitor, please be aware that desktop scaling is turned on by default and Mesh hasn’t installed the AMD Catalyst Control Center software that lets you change this option, which means you’ll have to download it.
The Pegasus A8’s CPU may not be as fast as an Intel i5, but the CPU is rarely the bottleneck in applications or games these days. Instead, its SSD provides a boost that’s more noticeable in everyday use than a few more gigahertz, and you can play most games too. There’s also room for expansion both inside and out. Its three-year warranty adds peace of mind too, making it a solid buy. Also worth considering though is the PC Specialist Enigma HD.
