Mesh - Elite E6600 Express

If you're thinking about upgrading your complete system, or buying an off-the-shelf Vista machine, then Mesh's Elite E6600 Express isn't a bad place to start, offering a decent blend of features, hardware and price.
Housed in the traditional, black and silver, midi-tower Mesh case, the Elite E6600 Express is, as you might expect from the name, built around one of Intel's E6600 Core 2 Duo processors, which is clocked at 2.40GHz and has a FSB (Front Side Bus) speed of 1,066MHz with a handy 4MB cache. Supporting the CPU is 2GB of 533MHz DDR2 memory, so there's plenty of power for Windows Vista to play around with.
Talking of Vista, the Elite E6600 Express comes with Vista Home Premium pre-installed, with the fabled Windows Aero feature, so you'll be wanting something half-way decent to power the graphics. Mesh hasn't skimped on this, providing a mid-range card in the form of Nvidia's GeForce 7950GT;

All this hardware is plugged into an Asus P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe motherboard which uses the previous generation Nvidia Nforce4 SLI x16 chipset rather than one of the latest chipsets. Having said that, the chipset does provide support for two full-speed x16 PCI-E graphics slots and, as only one of these slots is used by the 7950GT, you only have to add a second 7950GT to get the full benefits of SLI graphics.
The motherboard also has integrated Gigabit Ethernet and 8-channel audio, but Mesh has decided to ignore the built-in audio and add a decent sound card in the shape of a Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme, the output of which drives a good set of Creative Inspire T7900 7.1 speakers.
It's a pretty quiet system too, helped by the passive cooling Asus uses on the motherboard, which explains the pipework that stares you in the face when you open the case. Once open, the case internals show that a bit of care has been taken putting the Elite E6600 Express together, with sensibly routed and clipped cabling and plenty of room to get at the internals should you feel the need to.
For storage Mesh has supplied a 320GB Seagate hard drive, one with a 16MB cache, so transferring large files quickly shouldn't be a problem. The drive cage fitted in the Elite E6600 Express can hold another three drives if you want to add more; tempting, as the motherboard supports RAID arrays.
You also get an 18x Dual Layer DVD burner as well as a 16x DVD drive, so there should be no excuses for not backing up any important data you might have.
The rest of the hardware package is rounded out by a good Sony 19-inch X-Black TFT monitor and a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo. The software bundle is useful too: Microsoft Works 8.5 with a free 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, Cyberlink Video Editing Suite which includes seven titles, and BullGuard Internet Security 6.0. Mesh includes a three-year warranty, with the first year on-site and years two and three back-to-base.

source:itreviews.com