Puget Systems Serenity SPCR Edition: Blissful Silence
by Dustin Sklavos on February 10, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Radeon
- Sandy Bridge
- Puget Systems
- Serenity SPCR
Gaming Performance
It's not going to surprise anyone to see the Puget Serenity take last place in all of these tests; the second-slowest gaming system we've reviewed sports a Radeon with more than twice the number of stream processors, more than twice the memory bandwidth, and higher clocks to boot. That said, many of the really high scores we've seen are largely academic: can anyone really tell the difference between 100 frames per second and 150? Without getting into the ridiculous argument of whether or not the human eye can see more than 30 frames per second (if it's not supposed to be able to, I'm pretty sure most of the video geeks in the readership—myself included—are superhumans), that framerate should still be your baseline for acceptable performance.
Outside of the stunningly CPU-limited StarCraft II, Puget Systems's Serenity is able to at least beat the 30fps mark by a fairly healthy margin. I like to see framerates in at least the forties to ensure smooth gameplay, but any of these games are perfectly playable at our "High" preset, which is basically running them at maximum or near-maximum (as in the case of Call of Pripyat) settings, 1080p, and no anti-aliasing (excepting Left 4 Dead 2). Knowing that we're a little bit close to our ceiling, let's see what happens when we do kick anti-aliasing in with our "Ultra" preset.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is pushing its luck and Call of Pripyat is fairly punishing even on our other systems, but for the most part these games (outside of Call of Pripyat) remain playable and fluid. Shifting the bottleneck back to the video card in StarCraft II sends the Serenity tumbling back to the bottom of the heap, but even then it's still very playable. Gamers looking for extra frames may want to disable anti-aliasing in that title anyhow, as the image quality difference is negligible when the performance impact is taken into account. Suffice it to say these settings are basically the threshold for the Radeon HD 5750, and while performance is good, the 6850 is going to be a welcome upgrade.
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flemeister - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
"why did they pick a 850W PSU?"They didn't pick the CP-850 because of it's 850W rating, they picked it because it's the most suitable for the job:
1) It's exceptionally quiet
2) It's pretty cheap for the wattage on offer
3) With no fan in the front of the HDD/PSU chamber for the sake of silence, the 120mm fan on the CP-850 provides cooling for hard drives in the lower drive cage
4) Most important of all, the fan only ramps up from its minimum speed after reaching ~300W load (in a hotbox; ~400W if it's intaking cooler air, such as when installed in the lower chamber of the P183). With such low power consumption in this setup, the PSU fan will never ramp up. Even with Crossfired 5750's, max power consumption will have trouble going past 300W.
5) What are the alternatives? Something else this quiet would cost a similar amount and be just as quiet or perhaps noisier. May as well use the CP-850.
See the SPCR review of the unit for more details.
michal1980 - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
I read the spcr reviews. Bla bla bla. A smaller PSU, picked for the correct energy usage, is whats needed. This isn't engineering, this is over kill.There are fanless psu's outthere if you are going for ie from the spcr site itself
Seasonic X-400. Game,set,match. No fan, will go up to 400watts. Whats Puget excuse?
Oh you need a fan for the hd? waa waa, hook up another super low rpm fans on a control. Idleing, have them turn off.
P.S.
Whats the excuse for the subpar gaming perfomrance, that anandtech seems to be whitewashing over?
Anchen - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Hey, which is cheaper? The antec 850, NOT the seasonic x-400. Game set match? The Seasonic x-400 is an awesome psu. It also costs a ton for 400w. Seems like a good excuse to me.
michal1980 - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
wow, the 850w psu is 7 dollars cheaper OMG, (850w= 119+12ship, 400w 129+6ship)This is a $2,000+ thats claiming to be designed for silence, and they cannot eat a ~$10 difference? Or just rise the price 10 bucks? And claim its even more silent?
The point is to use the right tool for the job, just throwing something bigger at a problem is dumb engineering.
Sagrim - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
It'd come out to around an extra $20 if you include the extra fan that would be needed for the lower cage/psu area. Which, would require the fan to be upfront near the case (notice, ZERO intake fans are at the front) -- which would most likely up the dB slightly (even at low).Also, the x-400 would leave little wiggle room in terms of upgrading the gpu, and/or overclocking (notice, it was the K series).
So, the Antec CP-850 provides the wind tunnel effect down below with it's "pass through" design, it's cheaper, it is stunningly quiet, and helps the overall airflow/cooling of the system.
I fail to see the need for the x-400, even if the CP-850 is considered overkill.
Taft12 - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
There you go bringing ACTUAL engineering into a newbie's rant against "dumb engineering".We're trying to keep things dumb around here! You're ruining it!
michal1980 - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
I've been on anandtech for years before you joined. And years before I even regesitered.As an engineer, I see dumb engineering.
smart engineering would be to go with a passive psu, that with a seperate fan. Dumb engineering to go bigger to solve the problem.
mino - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
Go for a beer and come back when you manage to process Sagrim's post.Thank you.
kmmatney - Friday, February 11, 2011 - link
Why would you want such as low-powered PSU? The 850W allows for upgrading components in the future - seems like a great choice.michal1980 - Friday, February 11, 2011 - link
because 400watts is more then enough for even a high power video card.Look back at anandtech gpu reviews.
single 6970 tops out at ~360 watts.
I love the more is better mentallity.
A direct result of stupidty, and a direct cause of waste.