Mesh i3570K Edge – CS review

The Mesh i3570K Edge – CS was off to a strong start with one of our favourite cases: a Fractal Design Core 3000. It’s well built, snazzy looking and sound-proof. It doesn’t have a dust-proof grille at the bottom, but we’re nonetheless won over by its anti-vibration drive trays and two silent fans. There’s even a fan controller backplane to provide further control over fan speed and, therefore, noise.

It’s cleverly designed, too, and the centre drive cage can even be removed to make space for longer graphics cards. If you leave it in place, the case has six 3.5in bays and two 5.25in bays. One of each is occupied, by a 1TB hard disk and a DVD-RW drive respectively.

The system has an Intel Core i5-3570K processor, which has been overclocked from 3.4GHz to 4GHz. This is one of the most modest overclocks we’ve seen with this CPU. So, although the PC scored 113 in our benchmark scores, which shows it’s fast, we’ve seen PCs with this processor score a lot better. The 8GB of RAM installed is plenty for all but the most intensive of video-editing tasks, too. Only two of the motherboard’s four memory slots are occupied by 1,600MHz DDR3 modules, so it’s easy to upgrade to a massive 16GB, too.

The motherboard is an MSI Z77A-G43, which won our coveted Best Buy award when we reviewed it standalone. Unlike most mid-priced LGA1155 motherboards, the Z77A has two full-speed PCI-E x16 slots, as well as three PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots, although one of these is blocked by the graphics card. The pair of x16 slots are ideal if you want to add a second graphics card in the future. There are also four SATA2 ports and two SATA3 ports.

The PC is equipped with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti. A driver conflict prevented us from running our standard Dirt Showdown test, but the card achieved a frame rate of 26.7fps in Crysis 2 at Ultra quality at a resolution of 1,920×1,080, rising to just over 30fps when we dropped it to very high quality. The graphics card has two DVI outputs, as well as HDMI and VGA ports.

The motherboard comes with drivers for THX TruStudio Pro audio processing, based on software audio processing technology from Creative. However, although you’ve got a few interesting features such as virtual surround sound and smart volume adjustment, your audio is provided by a run-of-the-mill Realtek ALC892 codec chip, so won’t match that of a dedicated audio processor.

The motherboard’s back panel provides eight USB ports, two of which are USB3. There are another four USB ports, including two more USB3 connections, at the front of the case. That’s a lot of very useful connectivity for all sorts of external devices. There’s also a PS/2 port on the back for mouse or keyboard, Gigabit Ethernet and six 3.5mm analogue audio outputs for up for 7.1 surround sound, as well as the obligatory headphone and mic ports at the front.

The monitor is an Acer G226HQL with a resolution of 1,920×1,080. It’s only a 21.5in display, but it produced an excellent 97 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, although it looked a little green-tinged at default settings. Its contrast ratio, on the other hand, was a conspicuously poor 255:1 in our measurements, but at least the matt display means you won’t have to suffer annoying reflections.

The Logitech mouse and keyboard are the simple wired set that we see with a lot of basic PCs. They’re reasonably comfortable and accurate to use, although most people will ultimately upgrade to something that’s better suited to their own typing style and hand size.

We really like Mesh’s choice of case and motherboard, while the processor is an enduring favourite of ours. However, the Acer G226HQL monitor’s small size and poor contrast make the i3570K Edge – CS a poor choice when you can buy the faster Chillblast Fusion Sprite, with its 23in IPS display, for the same price.