Product Reviews

Amendment: You may have noticed that the Mesh CubeX64+LAN Xtra on page 80 of our current issue was given six stars, but no award. This was an oversight on our part. In fact, the CubeX won a Recommended award in recognition of its compact style, impressive performance and value price.

Compared to most PCs we see, the Mesh CubeX64 is tiny. Don't let that worry you, though. This small thing really is beautiful. The CubeX64's smooth black finish, mirror-effect Perspex fascia and cool blue LED power light look fantastic. The whole effect is enhanced by the matching TFT monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers.

Despite its size, the Mesh manages to squeeze in all the core components you'd find in a standard-sized desktop case. At the heart of this machine is an Athlon 64 3000+, one of AMD's fast 64-bit processors. This explains why the system notches up an excellent 2D score of 1,511. An ATI Radeon 9800Pro graphics card powers the CubeX64 to an equally impressive score of 18,479 in 3DMark 2001. That's enough to play even the most demanding new games. This system has a hefty 160GB hard disk, and decent 512MB of RAM. It also includes a Sony DVD writer that can write to DVD+ and DVD- disks at 8-speed, the fastest DVD writing speed currently available.

As well as its core components, the CubeX64 comes with a built-in TV tuner: a device that lets you watch telly on your PC. The tuner's remote control sensor plugs into the back of the TV tuner card and dangles on the end of a long piece of wire. It's a great shame that Mesh couldn't have integrated it into the case. As it is, it looks untidy. But our big gripe is with the tuner software. It's meant to work like Microsoft's Windows Media Center, but we found it confusing to use. It frequently stopped working - only coming to life again when we restarted the PC. Hardly convenient. But on the bright side, you can use the TV tuner to capture video from analogue devices such as camcorders. With a bit of determination it could turn you into the Spielberg of home movies.

If you fancy knocking out a movie masterpiece, you could use the video-editing

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software that comes supplied with the Mesh, Pinnacle Studio 9 SE. You also get the cartoon-style shooter XIII, Championship Manager Season 03/04 and the excellent combat flight simulator, Lock On. Mesh also provides Microsoft's Works 7.0 software. This isn't as good as Works Suite, which comes with a full version of Microsoft Word, but its word processor, spreadsheet and database programs are decent enough.

The Logitech keyboard and mouse aren't cordless but, again, they look the part and have a quality feel, although we found the keys a little too soft at the end of their travel for our liking. The CubeX64 was also rather noisy. This is mostly down to the fan that cools the Athlon 64 processor: it whirrs audibly all the time, despite special thermal control features that allow it to slow down when the processor isn't working hard. On the plus side, the CubeX's Viewsonic VE710b flat-panel monitor not only looks fabulous, it performs superbly too. Its picture is bright and vibrant, and its 1,280x1,024 resolution means icons won't take up too much space on your Windows desktop. Watching DVDs is a fabulous experience. The screen is bright, and easy to view from a wide range of angles, and suffers none of the smearing that plagues fast-moving images on inferior displays.

The Creative I-Trigue speakers are only a stereo set. This wouldn't be a problem with most PCs, but as this one is designed as an entertainment system, it will presumably be used to play games and DVDs, and surround sound would make both far more engrossing. Still, the stereo desktop speakers are good for music and they complement the CubeX64's looks nicely. The joystick and Belkin Nostromo Speedpad are both decent gaming devices.

One thing you do lose with a small case like the CubeX's is any real scope to expand the PC by adding new components. The motherboard's single PCI slot is occupied by the TV tuner, and there are only two RAM sockets - both of which are occupied. You'll have to throw away at least one of the two 256MB sticks if you want to increase the total to more than 512MB. The CubeX64 does have four USB 2 ports, though - two at the front and two at the back. There's also a mini-FireWire port on the front of the case, while the rear has a full-size version. There's gigabit Ethernet too, and optical as well as electrical audio outputs. You also get a built-in memory card reader with two slots, allowing you to read Smart Media, CompactFlash, SD and MMC memory cards.

The CubeX64+LAN Xtra isn't perfect. A temperamental TV tuner and the lack of surround sound prevent it from winning a Top 50 Best Buy award. Still, to get a PC this small and powerful - and for so little money - is a feat in itself.