Mesh Elite 6700 PC Pro
Look past the tacky exterior and there’s an impressive degree of power here – albeit little luxury
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪
PRICE from meshcomputers.com
£582 (£699 inc VAT)
We’re not ones to be swayed by flattery, but we felt a certain pride on learning that Mesh had put together a £699 PC specification just for us. This quickly evaporated, however, once we saw what it looked like. No two ways about it: the Thermaltake Versa N21 case is an ugly thing, finished in fingerprintattracting glossy plastic and standing an entirely unnecessary 513mm tall.
Happily, the internals are much more agreeable. Mesh has opted for a Core i7-6700 processor, running at 3.4GHz with a maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4GHz. This lifts application performance: not only do Core i7 chips have larger onboard caches than their Core i5 cousins (8MB versus 6MB), they also feature Hyper-Threading, allowing them to multitask more efficiently.
The Elite 6700 thus took jointsecond place in our desktop benchmarks this month, with a score of 143 that ranked behind only Wired2Fire’s overclocked Workstation Ultima. And when we fired up a 3D game, the Elite 6700 PC Pro left the Wired2Fire in the dust, thanks to a Zotac-branded Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. As we saw with Chillblast’s system, this card is more than capable of delivering smooth gaming at 1080p, and it remains whisper-quiet while doing so.
The included 16GB of DDR4 memory should be enough for the lifetime of the machine, although two spare DIMM slots are available if you do somehow end up needing more. Mesh’s 240GB Crucial BX200 SSD proved to be the fastest SATA drive in the group, with its 520MB/sec sequential read speed. And if you want to move up to faster storage down the line, there’s an empty 32Gbits/sec M.2 slot right there on the motherboard.
Indeed, Asus’ Z170-P motherboard affords an impressive range of internal expansion options. Even with the graphics card occupying the PCI Express x16 slot, there’s still a full-width PCI Express x4 slot and two PCI Express x1 slots available, as well as two conventional PCI slots for those older add-ons.
External connections are slightly less generous: two USB 2 ports and two USB 3 ports at the rear, and the same at the front. This isn’t exactly a smorgasbord of connectivity, but it’s slightly mitigated by the presence of a 5Gbits/sec USB Type-C socket, which