This overclocked water-cooled desktop is reasonably fast and nicely loaded.

At $3999 (as of
September 12, 2007) bundled with a 22-inch LCD, the P3503 is a
well-equipped system that includes a generous total of 650GB of
hard-drive space and offers solid performance.

The model we looked at has a 2.93-GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6800
processor that Polywell has overclocked to 3.33 GHz (and covers under
warranty), plus 2GB of DDR3 RAM. The company also offers the P3503 with
Intel's 3-GHz QX6850 quad-core CPU for the same price as the QX6800.

Interestingly,
however, even when competing with models using the QX6850, the P3503's
overclocked QX6800 processor held up fairly well in our tests.

Running
Windows Vista Ultimate in our WorldBench 6 Beta 2 test suite, the P3503
earned a score of 122, putting it a little behind the gaming-PC field's average of 126 but well behind the blazingly fast Xi MTower IGE-Stacker's WorldBench 6 Beta 2 result of 139.

Equipped
with a single 768MB EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics board, the P3503
scored consistently well for all resolution settings in gaming
performance. It ran at 180 frames per second in Doom 3 at 1280 by 1024
resolution, just beating competing models, including the Xi MTower
IGE-Stacker.

The P3503's black, midsize-tower case has
ventilation grilles on the front and side, both backlit with blue
lights. The side panel comes off easily, and inside the case a
water-cooling system and a copper heat sink help keep the system from
overheating.

Our test machine came with a dual-layer
DVD burner that supports LightScribe labeling (a silk-screen-like,
high-contrast label on the top side of CD or DVD media), a
DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo player, and a multiformat card reader, leaving
three of the six external drive bays open. A Seagate 500GB hard drive
and two Western Digital Raptor 74GB, 10,000-rpm hard drives occupy
three of the four internal drive bays, and five open slots (two PCIe
x1, one PCIe x16, and two PCI) are available for further expansion.

The
P3503's Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard supports CrossFire graphics (using
two CrossFire-compatible cards, not the SLI-compatible GeForce 8800
card in our test system), and it includes on-board wireless networking
and an adjustable antenna. The P3503 also provides an ample number of
ports on the front and back, including nine USB ports and two eSATA
connections, but it lacks ports for serial and parallel peripherals.

The
bundled Samsung SyncMaster 225BW wide-screen LCD was easy to adjust,
and it displayed strong image quality with clear, readable text and
colorful graphics, including great-looking Vista Aero features. The
Logitech Premium Desktop keyboard and wireless optical mouse were both
responsive, solid performers, but gamers may want devices with more
programmable features.

The Polywell P3505 provides plenty of power and is a worthy choice for any power user.

--Richard Jantz