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Anyone who buys Mesh’s Slayer Xtreme Gamer had better make sure they have room for the huge tower case. It measures a whopping 470mm tall and 520mm deep. At least it keeps the noise down to a low-pitched hum thanks to its huge case fans and a heavy-duty CPU cooler. There’s lots of space inside; all the internal cables are neatly routed without obstructing any of the components or slots. The Asus PT6 SE motherboard has a pair of PCI-E x16 slots, one of which is used. This means you can fit an additional graphics card to go with the Radeon HD 4890 in CrossFire mode. There are two free PCI slots but only one PCI-E x1 slot, which is blocked by the graphics card. This means that any extra PCI-E cards will have to go into the spare PCI-E x16 slot, assuming you don’t want dual graphics cards. Given the power of the 4890, you probably won’t need to. Performance was excellent. The 6GB of DDR3 RAM should serve you well into the future. We also like the fact that Mesh has installed two hard disks. The first, used for the operating system, is a 64GB solid-state disk. The second, a 1TB hard disk, is left empty for your documents and media. This setup means you can upgrade or reformat your operating system without affecting your personal files. Mesh includes a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium, so you won’t have to go to the trouble of upgrading from Vista. The choice of a 24in Iiyama ProLite E2407HDS monitor is a good one – its image is bright, vivid and sharp. It’s a shame there’s no Blu-ray drive, though, as the monitor’s full HD resolution would make it good for HD movies. The Razer Arctosa keyboard is great for both gaming and typing, with responsive, low-profile keys. We like the Razer Diamondback 3G mouse, too.
While not the fastest PC we’ve seen, there’s great potential if you want to overclock it yourself. However, it’s £120 more expensive than RL Supplies’ Modula Enduro, which has a two-year warranty and a Blu-ray drive.