MESH ELITE SILENCIO PRO
If you want to stick with Intel, this strong all-rounder with a powerful GPU is your best choice
AMD’s Ryzen-powered renaissance means this hasn’t been a great Labs for Intel, with the Mesh Elite Silencio Pro one of only three systems rocking an Intel chip. In this case, it’s the Kaby Lake Core i5-7600; the quad-core, four-thread mid-range CPU rather than the overclocker’s favourite with a K suffix. It runs at a base clock speed of 3.8GHz, but can boost up to 4.2GHz.
In primarily single-threaded applications such as our imageediting benchmark, there’s little to choose between the Intel-powered Mesh and its AMD-based rivals, but in scenarios where multithreaded performance counts, such as our video-editing and multitasking benchmarks, the AMD systems pull ahead. If you’re buying a system for, say, video editing, the six-core, 12-thread AMD Ryzen processors give you more performance per pound.
In our 3D gaming tests, this mattered less, simply because in most games or VR applications the CPU is less important than your choice of graphics cards, and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is about as good as these things get at this price point. Asus makes two 3GB GTX 1060 cards, and this single-fan, compact model runs at a base clock speed of 1,506MHz against the larger, dual-fan model’s 1,809Mhz. All the same, the Mesh runs
Rise of the Tomb Raider and Metro: Last Light at 60 to 75fps at 1080p resolutions, even with the quality settings notched right up. The frame rate dives when you switch to 1440p, but still stays north of the 30fps level that most would consider playable.
Now, there’s good news and there’s bad news on the upgrade front. On the good side, you get a roomy Cooler Master case with excellent acoustic dampening and a full-sized ATX motherboard screwed in. The drive cages provide room for two 5.25in drives plus another 3.5in drive above the hard disk at the bottom. You could also screw a 2.5in SSD to the floor, and with three SATA 6GB/sec connectors free and an unoccupied M.2 slot, there’s scope to expand your storage.
It’s fine for now, with the 250GB Western Digital M.2 SSD backed up by a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. However, while we always hope that M.2 SSDs will make the most of the bandwidth of the interface, the WD drive is yet another that doesn’t seem to bother, maxing out at 510MB/sec sequential read speeds and 192MB/sec sequential write speeds.
The GTX 1060 card – an Asus model – is lower in profile than some in rival systems, and while the top PCI-E x1 slot is too cramped for comfort, there’s little to stop you using the PCI-E x4 slot below it or the two PCI-E x1 slots below that.
The only problem here is that, by picking a PC based on an Asus Prime Z270-P motherboard, itself based on Intel’s outgoing Z270 platform, you’re limiting yourself when it comes to future processor upgrades. Coffee Lake processors use the same LGA 1151 socket as the older Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs, but need the new Z3xx chipset to run.
Connectivity is also a little last-gen. You get six USB 3 ports, four on the rear, two at the front, but no USB 3.1 and no USB-C. PS/2 ports should really be obsolete by now, and there must be better ways to use the backplate space than a DVI-D port. Still, the Mesh is great for multiple monitor setups, with two DisplayPort 1.2 ports and two HDMI 2 outputs.
The Mesh is the most credible Intelpowered system in this month’s lineup, and a good, versatile system for work, creative endeavours and gaming. It just goes to show, though, how much AMD has changed the narrative for budget and mid-range builds. For performance now and potential for the future, it seems the better choice.