Mesh Pegasus A8 review

You may have heard of Mesh before, but the long-running PC manufacturer actually went into administration and ceased trading last year. Now it has been reborn, a new company under the same name, and this is the first PC we’ve seen from it. As with any new company, we’d recommend caution when buying, but we’ve received no complaints concerning it to date.

The Mesh Pegasus A8 is an AMD-based PC with a quad-core A8-3870K Black Edition processor running at 3GHz and a dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6770 graphics card. Its stand-out feature is the 60GB solid-state drive (SSD) that’s configured as a Windows boot disk, along with a 500GB hard disk for general storage.

The SSD makes Windows boot up more quickly and speeds up the system in general. It has around 36GB of free space, even though Windows is installed on it, which means you could install a few favourite applications or games on it to get better performance. SSDs are normally the preserve of much more expensive PCs, so we were worried that maybe Mesh had used a cheap SSD that might not present any performance advantage over a normal disk, but Dirt 3 loaded almost three seconds faster in our tests when installed on the SSD than it did when installed on the hard disk (16s versus 18.9s).

Its performance, however, lagged quite a way behind the Intel Core i5 chips we’re used to seeing in PCs. An overall score of 73 makes the Pegasus A8 about as fast as a high-end laptop. It’s still capable of running Office applications smoothly, but more intensive tasks such as video encoding or heavy photo editing will start to slow things down. The good thing is that the SSD’s quick file operations will counter-balance this performance shortfall.

There’s an integrated graphics chip on the A8 processor, but it’s pretty much surplus to requirements because of the dedicated graphics card. Sadly, the Radeon HD 6770 is too powerful to couple with the onboard graphics in Hybrid CrossFireX mode, but it isn’t powerful enough to deliver outstanding gaming performance. In Dirt 3, it managed a playable 36fps, but in Crysis 2 the frame rate dropped to 15.4fps. We had to reduce settings to get a playable frame rate of 38fps, which turned off most of the pretty effects.

We liked the Pegasus A8’s imposing Cooler Master case because it has plenty of room inside. There are plenty of drive bays, including two external bays of each type, although there are only three free SATA3 headers on the Pegasus A8’s microATX motherboard. Sadly, it’s short on expansion slots too. It has free PCI and PCI-E x1 slots, but both are obscured by the graphics card. Mesh has really missed a trick by not installing the card in the bottom PCI-E x16 slot, which would’ve freed up the other slots.