In a world dominated by Intel CPUs the Mesh Matrix 965DX Bianco comes as a breath of fresh air. The hardware pays homage to the AMD concept of platforms and consists of a quad core AMD Phenom II X4 965 CPU, an AMD 785G chipset and a Radeon HD 5770 graphics card.

As the Bianco name suggests, the system is white in colour. The 24-inch Iiyama TFT display is white, the wireless mouse and keyboard are white and the Micro ATX tower case is white with a stripe of silver across the front to provide some contrast. In the event that all that white sounds too clinical for your tastes, there is an alternative Matrix 965DX Nero model that comes in black.

From a cosmetic point of view the Matrix 965DX Bianco is eye-catching but it took us a few moments to figure out the location of the Power button. The only obvious button on the front of the Mesh is, in fact, the eject button for the Blu-ray drive so we took a close look and spotted the Power button is part of the vertical silver trim that runs up the centre of the case.

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When it's running the Mesh is rather noisy and we lay the blame primarily at the door of the CPU cooler. The problem is that the AMD Phenom II X4 965 CPU has a TDP rating of 125W so Mesh has little choice but to wheel out the big guns when it comes to keeping it cool. Slower AMD CPUs are rated at 95W or 65W.

As a result the 92mm fan on the Akasa cooler roars away at a fair pace and churns out a fair amount of noise. By contrast the PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 graphics card is very quiet.

Although we found the noise of the Mesh somewhat annoying when we were performing day-to-day tasks such as writing e-mails and browsing the web, we were able to fully enjoy Blu-ray movies. Mesh supplies a Samsung Blu-ray combo drive and CyberLink's Blu-ray Disc Suite which includes PowerDVD 8. The DVD eject button is covered when the tray slides out and pushes the stealth flap down, though, which forces you to close the drive by pushing the tray.

The 3W speakers integrated into the Iiyama display are horribly feeble so we used headphones while we watched ‘Blood Diamond' so the noise made by the PC wasn't a concern. We also used headphones for a spot of gaming and found that the combination of Phenom II X4 and HD 5770 allowed us to play Far Cry 2 at Full HD resolution with the all the settings cranked up to maximum. The frame rate was higher than 50fps, dropping to 30fps with high levels of anti-aliasing.

We have mixed views about the peripherals. The 24-inch Iiyama display supports a Full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 with 2ms response time along with a full complement of HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs. Unfortunately the 2 x 3W speakers are too feeble to allow you to enjoy movies or music, so you'll need a set of speakers if you want to take advantage of that Blu-ray player.

The wireless mouse and keyboard are connected to the PC via a tiny wireless dongle that handles both devices, which leaves five USB 2.0 ports free on the rear of the tower with two more ports on the front. Although they look neat and tidy, the ambidextrous mouse feels uncomfortable and makes a nasty clicking noise when you use the buttons, and the layout of the keyboard could do with some work. The Delete key is in completely the wrong place and the Enter key is awkwardly located inboard of the Page Up and Page Down keys.

The Mesh PC was supplied with the CPU running at the stock clock speed of 3.4GHz so we went into the BIOS settings of the Asus M4A785T-M motherboard to try some rudimentary overclocking. Asus includes an overclocking profile that raises the speed by ten percent so we ended up with a CPU speed of 3.76GHz and 8GB of DDR3 RAM running at 1472MHz.

The extra clock speed raised performance in PCMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage but, oddly, the frame rate dropped slightly in Far Cry 2. The process of overclocking the Mesh increased the loaded power draw from 185W to 250W and, as the benefits are questionable, we'd advise you to leave the clock speed unaltered.

The Mesh Matrix 965DX Bianco proves that AMD hardware can deliver a package that is competitive against Intel. The heat output of the Phenom II X4 CPU means that the cooling is relatively noisy but overall this is a small, neat, effective PC.