Asus Pundit P1-AH1 review

Asus's Pundit P1-AH1 is one of the smallest barebones PCs that we've reviewed.

Around the same size as a copy of Yellow Pages, the slim case can stand horizontally or vertically and wouldn't look out of place in most living rooms as a media centre PC.

Asus has chosen Nvidia's nForce4 chipset with onboard GeForce 6100 graphics. While we've seen motherboards that use these graphics before, the Pundit's is the first we've seen to provide both D-sub and DVI outputs. However, it's DVI-I, which outputs only a digital signal, so you can't use this case to run two analogue monitors. There's also no TV-out. If you're planning to use the Pundit P1-AH1 as a media centre, you must connect it to an LCD. There's no way to upgrade the graphics, either, as there are only two PCI slots in the case. Still, these can be used for dual digital TV tuners, so you can record one channel while you are watching another.

The Pundit P1-AH1 supports all AMD Socket-939 processors, although Asus recommends you don't use anything more powerful than a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ because of the small 250W power supply. There's room for an optical drive and a hard disk. The optical drive sits neatly and unobtrusively behind a flap, so you don't have to worry about getting a black drive to match the Pundit P1-AH1.

Barebones systems are generally easier to build as they come with the motherboard installed, but the Pundit is more challenging than most because it's so thin. Fitting any of the components requires you to take the whole case apart. To fit the PCI cards, you first have to unscrew and remove the riser card and its cage. Fitting the loaded cage back into position is tricky. The optical drive and hard disk cage also have to be removed to fit your drives and provide access to the memory and processor socket. Getting the full drive cage back into position and past the power supply is tricky, as is connecting the SATA and IDE cables.

Even though there are only SATA ports for your hard disk, the Pundit P1's power supply doesn't have any SATA power adaptors. Instead, you need to connect the provided Molex to SATA adaptor. Getting the processor's heatsink and fan off is a feat; the retaining clips are tricky to remove in the confines of the case and the fan has a protruding chimney that overhangs them.

After fitting the system together using our Athlon 64 3500+ test processor, we noticed the system got incredibly hot, as all the components are packed so tightly together. We even experienced some write errors to the hard disk when we were installing Windows. Replacing the loud Asus heatsink with an AMD reference cooler cooled down the processor and prevented further write errors, so we could complete the Windows installation. The AMD cooler was also much quieter, so we'd recommend that you make this change.

However, we'd also advise you not to put anything too powerful in this case, as heat could become a big problem. If you are going to build a more powerful but still small PC, Shuttle's XPC SN21G5 (reviewed on page 41) runs much cooler and its slightly larger case is easier to work on.

Performance was just above our reference PC's, although graphics performance from the GeForce 6100 isn't good enough to play games. As you can't upgrade the graphics, we wouldn't recommend the Pundit to gamers.

Small and attractive to look at, the Pundit P1 is a fine choice for a small media centre PC and it's good value. The heat and poor graphics, however, mean it's not a good choice if you want to build a powerful PC.

Author: David Ludlow