MESH Elite G4 760SLi Review

1. Introduction2. MESH Elite G4 760 SLi Externals3. MESH Elite G4 760 SLi Internals4. KFA2 GTX 760 SLi5. Testing Methodology6. PC Mark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark 20118. 3DMark9. SiSoft Sandra Bandwidth10. Cinebench 11.5 64-bit11. Synthetic: HDD & SSD Testing12. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (DX11)13. Gaming: Bioshock Infinite (DX11)14. Gaming: Far Cry 3 (DX11)15. Thermal, Acoustic & Power16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

With the launch of Nvidia's new range of high end graphic cards well under way it is time for the Santa Clara engineering team to turn its attention to the more affordable end of the market. Each generation has its ‘people's champion' and Jen Hsun Huang will surely be hoping that the GTX760 can be that card for 2013. The MESH brand has been around since 1987 and when we asked them for a powerful, affordable GTX760 SLi system for analysis, they happily obliged. 

While MESH may not be competing for world records, they do have a reputation for creating systems that appeal to a larger audience … for less money that you might pay for a Hewlett Packard or Dell unit with a similar specification.

At the point where MESH's R&D testing finished on the GTX760 cards, a brand new system was created and made ready for sale on the company's web site and for detailed analysis in the KitGuru Labs. We spoke with the management team at MESH before they shipped the box and they told us that around 50% of their customers are insisting on Windows 7.

All MESH systems come with a ‘Gold' Warranty which means you get free collect and return in the first 3 months, then parts guaranteed for 2 years and an additional 3rd year of free labour should any issues arise.

MESH Elite G4 760 SLi

CPU: Intel Core i7 3770k @ 4.6GHz
RAM: 8GB Crucial Ballistix 1600MHz
Motherboard: MSI Z77A-GD55
Graphics: Dual 2GB KFA2 GeForce GTX 760 in SLi formation
SSD Boot Drive: 120GB Samsung 840
Data Drive: 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA III 6GB/s
Optical Drive: BluRay
Power Supply: 750w 80+ Bronze
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100 Extreme Performance Liquid Cooler
Case: Fractal Design R4
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Warranty: Gold Warranty (2 years parts and labour, 3rd year labour only with 90 days free collect and return)

Price: £1,450 inc vat and Delivery

While the MESH Elite G4 760 SLi travels inside the Fractal Design R4's packaging, MESH has taken the extra step of repackaging that box inside an even larger box – complete with additional foam and hardened corner protectors.

MESH has chosen the non-windowed version of the R4, which may not be to everyone's taste.

We reviewed the Fractal Design R4 back in September last year and it scored 9 out of 10 in our lab test. Our conclusion text said “(The R4) offers a similar level of build quality to cases from Corsair with the added benefit of extensive sound deadening. The excellent acoustic performance of this case is sure to be a key selling feature as it’s one of the quietest mid-tower cases available on the market.”

The top of the R4 is equipped with two USB 2 ports and two USB 3 ports, alongside a reset and power button and a headphone and microphone jack.

The case is equipped with a 140mm exhaust fan. There are seven expansion slots in total which feature white vented covers to contrast with the black finish. The two GTX 760's are installed in SLi.
 
The MSI motherboard has plenty of connectivity on the rear panel, including DVI, HDMI and VGA ports. It would be important to point out that these should not be used, as the system is equipped with two discrete graphics cards. Some system builders would cover these ports to help negate possible set up issues.

The internals of the MESH Elite G4 GTX 760 SLi are quite neat and tidy although we have seen better cabling routing.

 

While we could say that the tension in the graphics card power cables was a little tight, it would be easy to adjust. Future upgrades – given the set up of the modular power supply would be a breeze.

We would recommend that Mesh start to adopt better known power supply brands such as Corsair or Seasonic in future, even with a slight price premium. The enthusiast audience are very critical of this.

 

The inclusion of the awesome Corsair H100 Extreme Performance Liquid Cooler for the Core i7 3770k processor is a cracking choice. In our extensive component review, our only negatives were (a) is your chassis man enough to cope with its radiator and (b) can your wallet cope with the cost.

Data storage is well taken care of with a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD for the operating system and applications – alongside a 2TB Barracuda data drive. Personally, we'd like to see a second 2TB drive so we could configure an additional backup for maximum security – but adding a NAS to your home network would help you achieve the same result, so this is not a major gripe.

Any system armed with 8GB of Ballistix 1600MHz memory is unlikely to suffer any kind of significant bottleneck unless you're planning on driving a program like AfterEffects to the max. With the way that memory prices are at the time of going to press, if you were interested in a little more performance here, you could always ask about a low cost upgrade to something like a 16gb kit of 2,133MHz modules.

The whole system is built around the MSI Z77A-GD55 mainboard with Crossfire and SLi support.
With the KFA2 GTX 760, nVidia is arming the upper end of the mid-range with 1152 processors, a 256-bit memory interface and 2GB of memory.

As the name suggests, the MESH Elite G4 760 SLi is armed with a pair of these cards, so you should expect significant performance – depending on the rendering method used by the program/game you're using and how good a profile is available in the drivers.

Measuring purely in synthetic terms, when KitGuru reviewed an Aria PC with a pair of the fastest GTX660 cards on the market, the 3DMark 2011 scores were 12,995 – which gives this MESH rig something to aim for, using relatively standard GTX760 cards.

 

The GTX760 slips neatly into nVidia's line up for 2013. Historically, a pair of mid-range cards could give the high end cards a serious run for their money. It will be interesting to see what MESH's dual KFA2 cards will be able to manage.

The MESH Slayer 3770K OC system is shipped with Windows 7 pre-installed. MESH include all the discs in one of the boxes, if you ever need to reinstall again at a later date.

The bios is configured nicely, with only a minor core voltage increase to ensure complete stability from the Core i7 3770k processor.

The system scores 7.8 which is close to the maximum rating in Windows 7. Honestly, we don't rate the Windows Experience system too highly, however it is a useful little tool to get a quick overview of potential system performance.

The default software install is quite clean, although we would de-install BullGuard and use our own preference of protection software. Not a huge issue, but it slightly taints the overall install as we know enthusiast users are very selective with third party software such as this.
 
 

Above an overview of the system in CPUz and GPUz. We can see the Core i7 3770k is overclocked to 4.6ghz and the memory is correctly configured to run at 1600MHz with 9-9-9-24 timings. The MSI Z77A-GD55 is running with V1.9 bios.

While there is no doubting the raw processing power of a pair of GTX760 cards in a perfectly configured SLi set-up, the driver profile remains something that you will need to be aware of when pushing hard on the latest games.

We are using a 24″ Iiyama ProLite E2407HDS monitor for this review today.

Comparison Systems (for specific synthetic test compares):

Intel E5 2687W x 2
Motherboard: Asus Z9 PE-D8 WS
Coolers: Corsair H80 x2
Memory: 64GB Kingston Predator 1,600mhz 9-9-9-24 1T
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (1,200mhz core 1,600mhz memory).
Power Supply: Seasonic 1000W Platinum Modular
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li X2000FN
Monitors: Dell U3011, 3x Ilyama ProLite E2472HDD
Boot Drive: Corsair 240GB Neutron GTX SSD
Secondary Drive: Corsair 240GB Neutron SSD

Intel E5 2660
Motherboard: Gigabyte X79S-UP5-WIFI
Cooler: Corsair H100
Memory: 16GB G.Skill ARES 2,133mhz @ 9-11-10-28
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (1,200mhz core 1,600mhz memory).
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li X2000a
Boot Drive: Intel 510 120GB
Secondary Drive: Patriot 240GB WildFire

Intel i7 3960X EE
Motherboard: Asus P9X79 WS WorkStation
Cooler: Corsair H100
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator GT8 2400mhz memory
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (1,200mhz core 1,600mhz memory).
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Cooler Master Cosmos 2
Boot Drive: Crucial C300 128GB SSD
Secondary Drive: Patriot 240GB Pyro SE

Intel i7 3820
Motherboard: ASRock Extreme4-M
Cooler: Intel reference cooler
Memory: 8GB Corsair GTX8 @ 2133mhz
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Chassis: Lian Li PC60
Boot Drive: Crucial C300
Secondary Drive: Patriot Pyro SE 240GB

Intel i5 3570K @ 4.2 – OCUK Prodigy Arctic Gaming System
Motherboard: ASRock Z77E-ITX Intel Z77
Cooler: Coolit Liquid
Memory: Corsair Vengeance White 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
Power Supply: OCZ ZS 750W PSU
Chassis: Bitfenix Prodigy Mini ITX Case – White
Boot Drive: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB HDD

AMD FX 8150 Black Edition
Processor: AMD FX 8150 Black Edition
Motherboard: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Memory: G-SKill Ripjaws 1600mhz 8GB (2x 4GB)
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Chassis: SilverStone Raven 3
Boot Drive: Intel 40GB SSD
Secondary Drive: Patriot 120GB WildFire

Intel Core i7 990X
Processor: Intel Core i7 990x
Cooler: Corsair H100
Motherboard: Gigabyte G1 Assassin
Memory: Kingston HyperX 6GB
Drives: Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Chassis: Antec Twelve Hundred

Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (1,200mhz core 1,600mhz memory).
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)

Intel Core i7 2700k
Processor: Intel Core i7 2700k
Cooling: ThermalTake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 Z68 Motherboard
Chassis: Silverstone Raven 3.
Power Supply: Corsair 850W.
Memory: Corsair 1600mhz memory
Storage: Intel 80GB SSD (boot) / Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD.

Intel Core i7 2600k
Processor: Intel Core i7 2600k
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen 3
Cooler: Intel XTS-100H
Memory: ADATA 1600mhz DDR3 8GB (2x4GB)
Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower 850W
Boot Drive: Intel 510 SSD 250GB

Intel Core i5 2500k
Processor: Intel Core i7 2500k
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 Z68 Motherboard
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.2 CPU Cooler
Memory: Corsair 1600mhz memory 8GB (2x4GB)
Power Supply: Corsair 850W.
Boot Drive: Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD.

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
Motherboard: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Memory: G-SKill Ripjaws 1600mhz 8GB (2x 4GB)
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Chassis: SilverStone Raven 3
Boot Drive: Intel 40GB SSD
Secondary Drive: Patriot 120GB WildFire.

Software:
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
PCMark 7
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalDiskMark
SiSoft Sandra
MSI Afterburner

Games:
Battlefield 3 (DX 11)
Bioshock: Infinite (DX11)
FarCry 3 (DX 11)

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Asus USB BluRay Drive
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Canon 600D with a 24-70mm 2.8 lens and multiple 5500k lamps outside a 60″ studio softbox

Game descriptions are edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The overall score achieved by the MESH Elite G4 760SLi is in line with the previous 3770k O/C system we saw from this company, although it is slightly ahead. That one came with a single Titan instead of the pair of GTX 760 cards seen here.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

With a minuscule ~2% performance gap between the GTX 760 SLi set up and the nVidia Titan, you would be hard pushed to see that difference when the systems are running side by side in the real world. Worth bearing in mind that SLi, like CrossFire, will always be more driver dependent than a result achieved on a single GPU, but a pair of GTX760 cards from KFA2 will only set you back just over £400 at current retail prices – whereas a Titan is around twice as expensive at close to £800.

3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.

Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.

To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.

Again, the GTX760 SLi solution from KFA2 is very close to the kind of score you would get with an nVidia Titan – but all of the Futuremark tests scale incredibly well with multi-card solutions because they work on an AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) basis.

 

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

  

  
The overall system performance is excellent, although we do feel Mesh need to look at perhaps including performance 2,133mhz memory rather than just the 1,600mhz kit installed in this build.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

With the majority of the processing pressure landing on the Intel Core i7 3770k processor, the score of just over 9 is what you would expect – very powerful for a home rig. To get a significantly higher score, you would have to opt for a 6/12 core Intel i7 39xx/49xx series processor.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64. We use this program to test the onboard Samsung Solid State Drive.

The latest Samsung Solid State drives are equally good with both incompressible and compressible data.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Excellent results, scoring around 560 MB/s read and 262MB/s in the write test. Again, if you really want the very best performance on the market, you can upgrade to a drive where the read AND write performance scores are both over 500MB/Sec – something you can check with MESH.

Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE using the Frostbite 2 engine and published by Electronic Arts. It is the eleventh installment in the Battlefield franchise. The campaign takes place in various locations, including Iran to New York City; and follows the stories of Sergeant Henry Blackburn and Dimitri Mayakovsky.

This updated Frostbite engine can realistically portray the destruction of buildings and scenery to a greater extent than previous versions and can support dense urban areas. Battlefield 3 also uses a new type of character animation technology called ANT. ANT technology is used in EA Sports games, such as FIFA, but for Battlefield 3 is adapted to create a more realistic soldier, with the ability to transition into cover and turn the head before the body, as well as “drag fallen comrades into safety and mount weapons on almost any part of the terrain”.

Running at 1920×1080 with Ultra High quality settings, we ran through the same section of the game with a single card and in SLi mode to see what kind of benefit you would get from the second card. A single KFA2 GTX760 is powerful enough to give you more than 60fps on average, while the boost of around 86% you get from the second card bodes well for those of you who might be interested in Battlefield 4  – assuming that nVidia's software team manage to get to grips with the SLi profile needed to take advantage of the anticipated upgrade to the engine's tessellation technology.

BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games, published by 2K Games and was previously known as “Project Icarus” in development. Released worldwide on March 26, 2013 it has become a standard game in every AMD fanboy's collection due to the huge giveway with Never Settle. BioShock Infinite is the third instalment in the BioShock series and, fittingly, it runs on the Unreal 3 engine.

During development, a special team was assigned to ramp up the quality and complexity of the textures used by the game in a deliberate attempt to go above and beyond what is possible on a console. It was 5 years in the making and most critics agree that the wait was well worth while. Despite being developed in conjunction with AMD, the overall game plays equally well across both architectures.

Once again, we're running with the kind of settings that most of you will be using, with a resolution of 1920×1080 and image quality set to Ultra. Scaling on Bioshock: Infinite is marginally down on the experience we had with Battlefield 3 – but the single card score is still above 60 frames a second and the boost from adding a second KFA2 GTX760 is a fraction over 72%.

Far Cry 3 is a first-person shooter which also features role-playing game elements including experience points, skill trees, and a crafting system. The story mode map is around ten times larger than in the game's previous instalments. It is powerd by the Dunia Engine 2, which started life as the original Dunia Engine, but was heavily modified by the Ubisoft Montreal development team. Its key improvements included new water technology, a realistic weather system and facial expressions as well as new animation and global illumination technologies.

We are including it because it is a game that most people have a handle on and the numbers you see will help you visualise the kind of firepower that a modern card packs and the kind of advantage you can gain from adding a second or third card.

While the actual scores were the lowest we saw in any game run, the jump from adding the second KFA2 GTX 760 was the biggest with a boost of almost exactly 87%. That's probably got more to do with the length of time that this game has been popular as anything else, driver teams need as much time as possible to get the best SLi profile to market.

The room environment was maintained at 18c throughout testing. We measured temperatures when idle at the desktop for 20 minutes and after playing Far Cry 3 for 30 minutes.

Thermal performance is excellent for the system overall, while the GTX760 cards themselves do hit around 82 degrees under pressure. This is still a long way from the danger zone, but if you're a hobbyist and really want the icy-chill-factor, then you might want to look at an after-market cooling block for your graphic cards. The CPU temperature fluctuated from a low of 36 degrees to a high of 73 degrees, which is right where you would want it on an overclocked, watercooled PC.

Acoustically, the system benefits from the Corsair H100i and the Fractal Design chassis. Apart from the fans spinning up to full force for around 10 seconds when the system boots, things rapidly return to whisper mode and during testing we were more aware of the PC we were typing on than the MESH Elite G4.

 

When you factor in the wattage, considering there are two mid-range cards running at full speed, the overall draw is good. The system idles away at 60.6 watts, draws 152 when Cinebench is in full swing and claims 439 watts when both cards are in saturated gaming mode. The load draw puts a demand of around 58% onto the power supply – which is close to optimal.

When we realised that MESH was shipping a 3770k based system with Windows 7, we had a double-take moment. However when you sit back and look at the available data, enthusiasts have not flocked to the Haswell platform in droves and every survey that KitGuru has run on operating systems, shows that Windows 7 is by far and away the preferred choice for our readers.

Sure, this might all change by Christmas but, for now, Windows 7 and an Intel Core i7 3770k processor ticking along at 4.6GHz courtesy of a Corsair H100i liquid cooler remain a firm favourite among the enthusiast masses.

As with previous MESH systems that we have seen in the KitGuru Labs, the layout is neat and tidy and the timings/overclocking settings make sense. We were a little disappointed to see 1,600mhz memory incorporated, especially as 2,133mhz gaming quality memory is so inexpensive in 2013.

The GTX760 is one of the best value for money high performance graphics cards that you can buy today. One of them is enough to handle the latest games with high image quality settings, however adding two in SLi gives you GTX Titan levels of performance.

We know from KitGuru's in-depth review of the reference card that it has clear daylight between itself and a standard GTX660 in most tests, while only pulling away from the GTX660Ti in a few situations and matching a GTX670 in certain situations. While you need to rely on a driver profile to get the most from an SLi configuration, Nvidia are really active in updating, so we see no cause for concern.

The MESH Elite G4 760SLi is a fast, powerful system that can not only cope with the latest gaming titles, but the high state of overclock means it is able to handle a variety of different tasks, including 3D rendering and video editing. There are excellent components adopted throughout the build and the only niggles are the power supply brand and memory speed.

Pros:

• Only half a point away from an overclocked 4770k in CPU-heavy tests like Cinebench R11.5 64 bit.
• Superb gaming performance, close to GTX Titan levels.
• quiet running build.
• Price is much more competitive than for the MESH Slayer 3770k Titan we reviewed back in March.

Cons:

• power supply should be a tier-1 brand.
• Price drops on memory mean that 2,133MHz and 2,400MHz are replacing 1,600MHz as a mainstream standard.

KitGuru says: The GTX760 SLi set up shows just how effective nVidia's multi-card configurations can be. Solid overall build from MESH but they need to look at their choice of power supplies in future.

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