Lead review 19 sep

Product of the week PC: Mesh Matrix Eclipse PCW

Built into an imposing and bulky Chieftec tower case, the Matrix Eclipse looks best when it’s tucked away out of sight. The good news is that the specification is far more appealing.

At the heart of the Matrix is an Athlon 64 3500+ processor, running at 2.2GHz, backed by 512MB of PC3200 RAM. Two additional memory slots are available should users require more, and a 200GB Maxtor hard disk offers plenty of space. As demonstrated by its Sysmark 2004 SE score of 185, the system should comfortably handle just about any task thrown at it.

The PC is built on the A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard from Asus. This Nforce4 board enables two PCI Express graphics cards to work in parallel, which is a bonus for gamers looking to play the latest titles at high resolutions. Only one 128MB Geforce 6600GT card is supplied in this configuration. It can’t quite match the power of the ATI Radeon X800 chip found in the Carrera and Watford Aries (see reviews on this page), but it still gave a strong performance in our tests.

The Eclipse has plenty of internal and external expansion options, including seven USB2 ports and a single Firewire socket. It is also interesting to see a standard floppy along with the usual optical drives, although a model with a built-in memory card reader would have been preferable.

Like the Evesham and Jal systems, the Mesh comes with a Viewsonic monitor. This 17in panel provides a clear image, but unfortunately it lacks a DVI connector to make the most of the system’s graphics. However, this might not make much difference to most users.

On the software front, users receive Microsoft Windows XP Home and Works 8, plus video, disc-burning and backup utilities from Cyberlink.

While the installed graphics card could be better, the SLI option and strong overall performance make the Mesh Eclipse PCW a tempting purchase.