Mesh's GX700 is a high performance laptop that sits near the top of the company's current range of gaming notebooks; indeed it's second in performance only to the more expensive flagship GX700 Extreme.

The GX700 uses a high-end MSI chassis, attractively finished in a gloss piano black, and comes with a feature set that helps explains the price tag. With a 17-inch screen it's always going to have a fairly hefty footprint (405 x 314 x 38.2mm) but surprisingly it weighs just 2.6kg even with the battery, so it is portable up to a point. But adding the power adapter sends the weight up to 3.95kg, so this is one notebook destined to spend most of its life plugged into the mains.

At the heart of the GX700 lies an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 CPU backed by Intel's i965M chipset and 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory (expandable up to 4GB for an additional £99). The T7250 is clocked at 2.0GHz with a 800MHz FSB and 2MB of L2 cache, all of which gives the GX700 some impressive if not Earth-shattering performance: a score of 5,090 in PCMark05 means the GX700 is pretty much able to do anything you ask of it.

The full-size keyboard is well placed and recessed into the top of the chassis and has a good quality feel to it. The keys are nice and positive while the keyboard pad itself is firm without any visible flex. The trackpad is of the same quality as the keyboard and features a vertical scrolling function.

Above the keyboard sit the silver shortcut buttons for wireless and power: not only are they a contrasting colour to the chassis, they are also too big to miss.

The WSXGA+ widescreen display comes with a highly reflective Crystal Vision coating which, although giving the GX700 superb colour and detail ideal for watching DVD's, does reflect the lights in an office environment quite considerably. But the native resolution of 1,680 by 1,050 pixels gives it some useful desktop real estate and you also get a 1.3-megapixel web-cam built into the top screen surround.

Powering the graphics output is an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT chipset which comes with 512MB of dedicated DDR3 memory, but it is also able to access up to 255MB of the system memory for a total of 767MB. All of which gives the GX700 a fair degree of games ability, which is good considering that's what you are paying for.

It produces scores of 5,735 and 3,725 in 3DMark05 and 06 respectively when tested at a 1,024 by 768 pixel resolution, but of more importance is the average frame rate in F.E.A.R; a very playable 135fps at the same 1024 x 768 resolution.

Mesh has equipped the GX700 with a useful 250GB of storage space thanks to the Western Digital SATA hard drive. The drive is a fast job too, with an 8MB cache and a spin speed of 5,400rpm. To keep this drive free from clutter there is a DVD burner built into the left-hand side of the chassis.

Joining the optical drive are two USB ports while another can be found on the right-hand side along with VGA and HDMI ports. The rear panel holds just the LAN (Gigabit Ethernet) and modem ports along with the power in port.

Built into the front of the chassis are a 4-in-1 card reader, a 4-pin Firewire port and three audio ports for the 4.1 audio system. To talk to the outside world you get the aforementioned Gigabit wired Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth and, should all that fail for some reason, the modem.

Apart from the installed Vista Home Premium O/S, you get Microsoft Works 8.5 with a 60-day trial of Office 2007 and DVD burning software.

A well featured notebook including an HDMI port, with good all-round performance and graphics performance which should suit most gamers, while for the rest of us it's more than adequate.