MESH ELITE SKYLAKE PCA

£999 inc VAT • meshcomputers.co.uk

It may not resemble a gaming PC at first glance, but the Mesh Elite Skylake PCA exudes quality. Its tower case comes with a matt black finish that’s soft to the touch, giving it an expensive feel. At the top an illuminated display shows the current CPU temperature in a variety of colours, which can be altered at the push of a button.

Unlike most of the gaming PCs we review, the case has no transparent side panel. It’s a real shame in this case, because the Mesh Skylake PCA is by far the most impressive-looking inside. The case is spacious, with plenty of available drive bays and the Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 3 motherboard has attractive red and black details. Most impressive though, is the Raijintek Triton 250mm high performance all-in-one CPU cooler, its two transparent pipes fat and filled with striking blue coolant. There’s also a blue downlight that illuminates the desk surface from the bottom of the case.

Performance

Under that fancy cooler lurks an Intel Core-i5 6600K Skylake processor, overclocked from 3.5- to 4.4GHz. This yields a decent boost in performance without pushing components to the absolute limit. It’s coupled with 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4 RAM, and comes with a 250GB Samsung SSD backed by a 1TB Seagate hard drive. Although the SSD uses one of the two M.2 ports on the motherboard, it’s using the SATA interface rather than PCI-E, so it can’t match the raw performance of the Samsung 128GB SM951 used by Chillblast. It does, however, perform very well and its extra capacity may well prove more beneficial than extra speed.

Mesh has opted for the ever-popular nVidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, and in this case it’s a Palit-branded model running