Mesh Elite i3570K CS review

The Elite i3570K CS has a heavily overclocked Intel Core i5-3570k processor running at 4.4GHz. This is a big increase over the stock speed, but Mesh has opted to use the stock Intel CPU cooler rather than a tower-style heatsink, to more effectively dissipate the extra heat caused by overclocking.

Sensibly, Mesh has installed an additional 120mm intake fan on the side panel to push a constant flow of air onto the CPU cooler. This helped it stay cool. The PC completed our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 131. This was brought down by the multitasking score, which was lower than expected because the system only has 4GB of RAM.

Impressively, the Elite i3570K CS has a Sapphire Radeon HD7850 graphics card. It’s powerful, has 2GB of dedicated video memory and is capable of playing even the latest games at Full HD resolutions, as our graphics benchmarks show. Dirt3 produced a stellar 57.1fps, and even Crysis 2 produced a perfectly playable 28.9fps. Very few games should pose a problem for this machine, even with DirectX 11 and anti-aliasing enabled.

Another welcome inclusion is the 120GB SSD, which handles both Windows and storage. This is great if you have a large external hard disk or NAS device for your multimedia files, but less so if you want to play a lot of modern games – their large install sizes could quickly fill up the SSD. Mesh hasn’t fitted a secondary hard disk, so once it’s full you’ll have to start deleting files.

Thankfully, there’s ample room for expansion inside its Cooler Master case. Only one of the external 5.25in drive bays is occupied with a DVD re-writer, leaving three empty, along with one external 3.5in bay. The motherboard has three PCI slots, one PCI-Express x1 and one PCI-E x16 slot available, with the dual-slot graphics card using one PCI-E x16 and blocking the other PCI-E x1 slot. Three empty RAM slots mean you can upgrade your memory without removing the existing 4GB.