the cerise serene x2 4800 ($3,300.51 direct, $3,741 with 19-inch monitor) is one of a new breed of computers that strives to achieve quiet operation without sacrificing performance. it's sure to please the many media hounds who work in quiet homes or small offices. this system is not for the passive tv viewer (no tv tuner, no media center); it's for the person who wants an unobtrusive pc with the power to handle multimedia heavy lifting.

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the serene uses a conventional cooling system with fans to circulate air around its case, yet is still designed for noise reduction. when a high-performance gaming system like an alienware area 51 or dell xps is operating, legions of cooling fans within the system's case, either on top of the cpu, graphics card, or the motherboard, can create quite a racket. indeed, these fans tend to make so much noise in your home office or den that you may have to turn up the tunes on your speakers to drown out the din. other computer builders have tried to combat system noise by using sound-deadening matting or removing all extraneous length from the internal power and drive cables to improve airflow. and some take the radical approach of liquid-cooling their systems, which is more expensive.

the serene's game plan for silence is to employ slow-turning fans, in conjunction with larger, more efficient heat sinks for the graphics card and cpu. there are also shorter cables and tidy wiring to promote efficient airflow, and the pc's hard drives are locked away in enclosures that dampen distracting sound. passive coolers on the motherboard contribute to the system's overall quietness. and though the serene's athlon x2 4800+ is overclocked, it's not pumped up as much as it is in some gaming pcs, so it generates less extra heat. all of these improvements mean the system's operation is hard to hear even if it is on the desk next to you.

a good performer, the serene merits its high price by including solid features, such as two 400gb 7,200-rpm sata hard drives in a raid 1 array, and by proving to be very nimble on my benchmark tests. the dual-core athlon x2 4800+ processor powered through multimedia tasks on the windows media encoder (an excellent 6:24, comparable with the amd fx-60 processor at stock speeds), adobe photoshop cs2 (about 1 minute), and sysmark internet content creation (337) tests. these scores match or slightly beat the serene's immediate competitors and show that it is well suited for multimedia creation. and with help from the 256mb nvidia geforce 7900gt graphics card, it also garnered very good doom 3 scores across the board, demonstrating it can run with the big boys of gaming.

it's apparent to me that the serene is quieter and slightly more powerful than multimedia systems i've tested recently, such as the polywell poly 975mce-extreme and the cisnet a7099. and it's also much quieter than similarly priced gaming boxes such as the vigor force recon le and gateway fx510xl.

the cerise serene x2 4800 is a fast computer that's perfect for the multimedia power user, one who lives to transcode media files, or even just those with sensitive ears.

see how the cerise serene x2 4800 measures up to similar systems in our desktop comparison chart.

benchmark test results
check out the cerise serene x2 4800's test results .

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