Review: Puget Systems Deluge-i L3

Attention seasoned PC gaming vets: it's time to abandon your trusty, yet woefully out-of-date Windows 95 operating beige box. Yes it's treated you well. Yes you've clocked a legendary number of hours with Minesweeper. Yes you've unlocked the secret Solitaire deck with nude face cards (scandalous!). Commander Keen? Child's play.

Hell, it even runs Doom.

Yet, as much as you love that After Dark screensaver, if you're going to get a crack at the latest and greatest (there's a Doom 3 now!) you're going to need something new. Something overclocked and water-cooled. With LEDs. Blue LEDs! And it has to be made to order. Space Marines don't shop at Best Buy, so why should you?

Puget Systems builds desktops, laptops, and server towers, with more customization options than NASA can calculate. For its line of gaming machines, we took a look at the Deluge-i L3, a rig we custom built with aggressive components into an insultingly powerful, flashy gaming PC.

For starters, there's the Quad Core Intel Core 2 Extreme overclocked to 4GHz and 4GB of OCZ Reaper RAM. In the graphics department, three 768MB GeForce 8800 Ultras run in triple-SLI. Vista Ultimate chugs along smoothly with a 5.9 out of 5.9 on Micosoft's Experience index. We all know Vista is a lumbering dinosaur, but in this case, we didn't find a need to upgrade to XP. It has a 40 GB Xceed Ultra solid state drive for speedy access to programs and the like, with a second 500 GB Seagate Barracuda for housing our legally acquired content. Even accessing the Intertubes is fleet footed; a Killer network interface card actually improved our ping and helped up our headshot count. All of this is packed into a sturdy Antec P182 case, designed to keep decibel levels low. To bad there's the Koolance water-cooling system that includes 3 large fans thundering over its radiator. But it's better to be blaring than busted: even with all the cooling equipment, this monster idles at about 85° F, easily hitting 140° F during our more rigorous Doom 3 and Peggle sessions. You'll want to consider a noise canceling headset or a slammin' set of desktop speakers — when fully operational, this beast is louder than a monster truck rally.

If you can't already tell, this rig is excessive. Solid-state drives are absurdly expensive, even considering the data-transfer boost. The benefits of a separate network interface card are going to be negligible on a home network. And unless you want to create Skynet in your gaming crib, you don't really need the triple SLI — we couldn't even get this configuration to run Crysis at full specs. A lot of factors could've been swapped around that would result in a quieter, cooler running machine. But then again, we could've tried for dual-quad cores, a few extra terabytes of HDD space and picked up a fog machine to complete that 80's space station vibe.

Folks who like to DIY take note: We painstakingly calculated the price of components that made up our Deluge (method: Google + newegg + napkin). If you were to purchase each part separately, the cost comes to about $6,000. Puget's package weighs in at a hair less than $9,600. You get support, service, a parts warranty, a lot of helpful benchmarks, and hardware info, but you'll have to decide if the convenience of having someone else do all the legwork is worth almost 4 grand.