Puget Echo II review: Puget Echo II

We don't particularly enjoy giving bad reviews to products from smaller vendors, but Puget's living-room-minded Echo II is so overpriced that we're compelled to warn you away. Puget wants roughly $999 for the Echo II configuration it sent us. The same build from a competing mainstream vendor will cost $400 less. No amount of appreciation for the little guy can make up for such a vast price gap.

4.8

Puget Echo II

The Good

The Echo II has all of the connectivity options you expect to find in a living-room PC.

The Bad

It is $450 more expensive than a near-identical system from its mainstream competition.

The Bottom Line

We like smaller vendors because they often take risks that larger vendors won't, and we can even justify paying a bit extra for the privilege. Unfortunately, Puget makes a bad bet with the Echo II by offering no benefits over similar mainstream PCs that cost almost half as much. Keep shopping.

The Echo II comes in a compact case from Antec. The design is clean enough, and at 3.75 inches high by 8.5 inches wide and 12 inches deep, the case and its matte-black exterior will practically disappear if you connect it to a decently sized HDTV. The Zotac H55ITX motherboard includes DVI and HDMI ports, along with S/PDIF outs for audio and wireless networking, giving you all the ports you'd expect to find in a living-room-oriented PC.

Even though the case looks appropriately small, we were disappointed by its quality--specifically that of the latch securing the small door that conceals the DVD burner. With no indication of how to open the door, we pulled it down with a not unreasonable amount of force. The latch promptly broke, leaving the door hanging free. However irritating that design, it's only a minor issue compared with the large gap between the pricing of this system and that of its competition.

We picked the Gateway SX2840-01 as the primary comparison for the Puget, since it has almost exactly the same features, although in a slightly larger chassis. The Puget adds wireless networking, but you can add Wi-Fi to the Gateway with a $25 USB stick, so that's not a real advantage for the Echo II. Even accounting for adding Wi-Fi to the Gateway, the Puget still has a $425 price disadvantage.

It's almost not worth belaboring the Puget's underwhelming storage capacity given its pricing problem, but it's such an obvious issue we'd be remiss if we didn't mention it. The Echo II can only accommodate 2.5-inch drive storage, which suggests Puget focused on keeping the size of the Echo II small. We appreciate that thought, but when you consider that you might want a lot of storage space for media files on a living-room PC, the Puget's 160GB laptop hard drive seems ill-considered, especially compared with the 1TB drive in the Gateway. Puget offers a 500GB drive upgrade for an extra $45, but the last thing this system needs is a higher price tag.

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Rendering Multiple CPUs

Rendering Single CPU

Gateway SX2840-01

10,085 

2,773 

Puget Echo II

9,230 

3,994 

Apple Mac Mini (2.53GHz)

5,419 

2,899 

Dell Inspiron Zino HD

2,304 

1,329 

We're not surprised to find that the Puget matched the Gateway on our performance tests, since both PCs have the same Intel Core i3-530 processor. They both compare favorably with the $799 Mac Mini as well, and, as expected, they leave the Dell Inspiron Zino HD and its lower-end AMD Athlon II chip far behind. We found the Puget, as expected, also capable of playing standard definition and HD content smoothly from YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix. The problem, of course, is that though it has roughly the same performance as the Gateway, the Puget costs $450 more for few appreciable benefits, if any.

We mentioned that the Echo II has all of the ports you'd look for in a living-room system, but overall it also comes short of the Gateway in its connectivity options. You get no FireWire or media card reader on the Puget system. The Puget at least matches the Gateway's eSATA jack, and it offers a few more USB 2.0 ports, but that's not enough to make up for its other missing features, or its high price.

Inside the Echo II you get a single half-height PCI Express slot to add a low-end 3D card. You could also add a second 2.5-inch hard drive. The Gateway system only gives you room for half-height cards as well, but because it's a little larger than the Puget system you have an extra PCI Express 1X slot to play with, as well as two free memory slots. The Gateway can take only a single 3.5-inch hard drive, but given its 1TB drive compared with the Puget's 160GB drive, we'll gladly settle.

Juice box
Puget Echo II
Off (watts)	1.26
Sleep (watts)	2.13
Idle (watts)	29.23
Load (watts)	73.7
Raw (annual kWh)	128.9034
Energy Star compliant	Yes
Annual power consumption cost (@$0.1135/kWh)	$14.63

Perhaps the Puget's single material advantage over the Gateway is its power efficiency. We don't imagine savings of roughly $9 a year will be enough to sway anyone in the Puget's favor, but from a technical standpoint, we always appreciate a PC that can match its competitor's performance while using less power. We should also add that, in spite of its name, the Echo II is actually a very quiet little system. We can't say the Gateway was particularly loud, but if its pricing is out of whack, at least Puget has a grip on the technical underpinnings of a living-room system.

Puget's customer service policies are relatively limited, even for a smaller vendor. You get a year-long parts warranty, and labor for the life of the system, which on the labor side goes beyond the mainstream average. Its technical support is available only on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m PT, however, and its Web site informs you that you'll receive a faster response if you e-mail rather than call. Perhaps that's true, but a speedy e-mail response is of little help if your computer doesn't work.

Find out more about how we test desktop systems.

System configurations:

Puget Echo II
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.93GHz Intel Core i3-530; 4GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 128MB(shared) Intel GMA X4500 HD integrated graphics chip; 160GB Western Digital 7,200rpm

Apple Mac Mini (2.53GHz)
Mac OS X 10.6.2; 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8700; 4GB 1,067MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 9400M; 320GB, 7,200rpm Fujitsu hard drive

Dell Inspiron Zino HD
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.5GHz AMD Athlon X2 3250e; 3GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB (shared) ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics chip; 320GB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive

Gateway SX2840-01
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.93GHz Intel Core i3-530; 6GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 64MB Intel GMA X4500 HD integrated graphics chip; 1TB, 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive