Puget Systems Deluge Mini: The Art of Custom

Conclusion: Worthy of Enthusiast Attention

One of the overarching issues that we run into in reviewing boutique desktop machines is understanding that many of you in our audience prefer to roll your own. It's at that juncture that we have to figure out what each boutique brings to the table that you just can't do on your own. I built my own tower, and the cabling may be kind of a mess behind the motherboard tray but ultimately it gets the job done well enough that I would have a hard time really justifying paying someone else to put the system together.

There's definitely a price to pay, as the components and OS add up to around $1600 if purchased online. Factor in the assembly and overclock and we're still several hundred dollars short of the final sticker price. While it's certainly possible to do all of the work and assembly yourself, as a one-stop enthusiast PC setup there's a lot of custom options to consider.

Puget Systems brings more to the table than any one of us can really achieve. I've had the privilege of looking at the extensive reliability testing they do on the components they use in their builds, and the fact is that very few of us have thermal imaging hardware required to get a really good idea of where the hot spots in our builds are. And then while I'm sure many of you own a dremel and wouldn't have any problem modding your cases, I don't. The Deluge Mini is a custom build of the highest order.

I hate to keep dragging Origin's Genesis out here because it's really an excellent machine, but the Deluge Mini is $300 less for near-equivalent performance in gaming, a smaller form factor, a more finely tuned overclock, and much better acoustics. Origin will give you the overclock for free and they'll even do a pretty good job compared to some of the other boutiques, but Puget will spend more time and they'll build your machine with parts they've chosen expressly for their reliability. With that price difference you can grab an i7-2600K and an SSD and bring the Deluge Mini into complete performance parity with the Genesis. 

When I was testing and photographing the Deluge Mini I was consistently of the opinion that as an enthusiast first and reviewer second, no, I couldn't do a better job than Puget Systems did with this build. Spending over two bills is still steep for buying a desktop computer, especially given how fast these things are obsoleted, but if you want something powerful, reliable, cool, and quiet, it's awfully hard to beat the Deluge Mini. For that it deserves our Bronze Editor's Choice award.