Asus Pundit P1-AH2 Barebone System

9 out of 10 - Spectacular
great little barebones
add a cpu, ram, hard drive, and dvd drive for a perfect home theater pc. very cool looking. it includes ...
add a cpu, ram, hard drive, and dvd drive for a perfect home theater pc. very cool looking. it includes dvi and vga so using it with a monitor or a tv is simple.

cools adequately and is pretty quiet (when cool-and-quiet is enabled). amd processors don't match intel for performance, but they're perfectly fine for all but the most demanding user.

the led bar is ridiculously bright and bathes the whole room in an erie blue hue. but it can be unplugged easily. Read more
by ramarc (see profile) - June 6, 2008

9 out of 10 - Spectacular
Great design / easy assembly - ASUS again is on the right track
We ordered one of these systems merely to test it's viability as a custom built media centre.

Our test

...
We ordered one of these systems merely to test it's viability as a custom built media centre.

Our test configuration:

4800+ AMD CPU
250GB sata hdd
1024mb DDR2 533
54G PCI WLAN
Pinnacle Dual HD DVB tuner

First observations:

The case comes very well packed and after unpacking we couldn't help but be impressed by the sleek / simple design of the case. This would look great in any room of the house! The only two minor point we could find where the optical output location (under the front panel and no optical out on the back), and we would've really liked the front panel to be made of brushed alluminium instead of plastic.
That having been said, it has all the nescessary ports and connections and has both a DVI and an RGB video output even though it is powered by nVidia's GeForce 6150 onboard graphics. Straight away this tells us that this was never going to be a top of the line gaming system, but it still provides this little system with plenty of grunt on the graphics side for day to day multimedia apps. They even managed to include both a mini firewire and a standard firewire port on the front of this little beauty.
The assembly of this system is very well thought out and one of the very first things you'll notice is the sheer weight of the case. Even without the harddrive/optical/cpu/ram installed this thing weighs a tonne! Clearly ASUS is not skimping on the build quality. The instructions for assembly are quite clear and the CPU fan assembly provided with the case is easily removed by undoing two screws. After installing the nescessary parts to make this system go we installed Windows XP Pro SP2 on the system (any sold systems would have either Vista Home premium or XP Media Centre on it). After installation we ran the driver disc and installed the excellent (if somewhat limited in options) Recover Pro which comes with this system.
Al this installed without any problems and our system was ready for the testing. As per our policy, we made sure we had the latest version of all available drivers and bios installed before we gave this system a nice workout.

What we noticed first up was how quiet this system runs even when under full load. The controlling of the fan speed is obviously managed wuite efficiently and the design of the case allows for sufficient airflow.
On a whole this system ran beatifully and on par with other systems of a similair configuration, although it didn't set any speed records.
We really had to search hard to find any negatives with this product and the only thing holding us back from giving it a full 10/10 rating are the lack of an optical out on the back of the system and the plastic front on an otherwise solidly built system. To top it all off, this barebones case is priced very competitively. Well done ASUS, you have a yourself a winner here. Read more
by shsdarwin (see profile) - June 20, 2007