While not officially sanctioned by Intel for desktop use, the Pentium M processor has long been coveted by fans of quiet PCs and small form-factor boxes, for the very reasons the mobile CPU has excelled in the notebook arena: low power usage and minimal heat output. This custom PC from Puget Systems is the first Pentium M-equipped desktop system we’ve reviewed and we were eager to see how the chip would fare against its Pentium 4 brethren and AMD competitors.

The heart of this system is the 2.35GHz Pentium M 780, which sports 2MB of L2 cache. It’s keeping company with 2GB of DDR2/533 RAM, a single Western Digital 74GB Raptor, and a BFG GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB videocard. Most of the systems we’ve reviewed this year have incorporated some iteration of SLI, thus the lone GeForce 7800 card in Puget’s PC seems paltry by comparison. Nonetheless, the GeForce 7800 is more than capable of playing today’s games. Puget left sound duties to the onboard 7.1 channel HD audio controller, in lieu of the familiar Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, but this isn’t its biggest failing. Shipping a $4,700 system with only 74GB of storage is inexcusable; we’d rather see a quieter, nearly as fast 500GB Deskstar.

The stand-out feature in this rig is the Aqua-Computer Airplex Evo 1800 Radiator. This is the first fanless water-cooled system we’ve tested, and it’s made possible by the beefy, probably-big-enough-to-cool-a-small-car radiator. The CPU, chipset, videocard, and hard drive are all cooled by the heavy-duty water-cooling kit, which looks impressive at work with purple UV-reactive dye running through its water lines. All hardware is housed in an elegant Lian-Li PC-767 case, perfect for quietude.

The Puget system batted pretty low in SYSmark 2004, for which we blame the Pentium M. SYSmark simulates multitasking in various applications, and without dual cores or even Hyper-Threading, the Pentium M just can’t compete. Performance in Premiere Pro and Photoshop CS was more impressive, comparable to previous FX-55 systems we’ve tested. And the Pentium M 780 was able to encode our MPEG-4 test video as well as P4 systems with 1GHz faster clock speeds.

With its single 7800 GTX videocard, the Puget system couldn’t compete with the big boys in our game benchmarks. Still, it summarily spanked single-card 6800-based systems and managed to crank out 1.6 more frames per second than our 6800 Ultra SLI-powered zero-point rig in the 3DMark05 benchmark. And a score of almost 41fps in Doom 3 from a single card is definitely respectable, but we would have loved to see this system with a 7800 SLI configuration.

While the Pentium M provides good performance and runs cool doing so, the proc lacks multithread capability, SSE3 instructions, and 64-bit processing. So it’s not surprising that Puget’s custom system isn’t a high-performance gaming PC. Instead, it’s a high-performance quiet PC that allows the Pentium M to flex its gaming muscle. If your first concern is quiet operation, and you want something with a little get-up-and-go, then get up and go get this system. Otherwise, grab a system based on a full-throttle processor.
Claude McGyver

Month Reviewed: Holiday 2005

Verdict: 6

+ Silent Bob: Ultra quiet, great case and aesthetic detailing, slot-loading DVD.

- Rioting Mob: Not enough storage, no SLI, and the radiator is huge.

www.pugetsystems.com

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