Introduction

About a month ago, NEC brought their water-cooled PC concept into the Asia Pacific market outside of Japan for the first time and www.hardwarezone.com® was privileged enough to be there at the launch of the NEC PowerMate DL T8000 w (launch event can be found here ). Water-cooling has always been seen as a form of extreme cooling only ventured into by the techno-geek, but NEC sees it as the next mainstream cooling, built right into the desktop and transparent to the end-users. This is the first time a major computer manufacturer has introduced a consumer water-cooled desktop PC into the Asia Pacific market, so we decided to bring in one unit for a first hand look at what NEC is offering.

A high end water-cooled PC might give users an initial impression of a frame rate crunching monster, but NEC isn't really known to be into the boutique gaming scene like Alienware. Indeed, the PowerMate DL T8000 w sits as the flagship of NEC's PowerMate DL series of desktop PCs and does pack a decent punch in processing power with one of the new dual-cored Pentium D processors, but we found out that NEC's approach seemed to focus more on home entertainment convergence instead of gaming.

The NEC PowerMate DL T8000 w water-cooled PC.

The PowerMate DL T8000 w comes as a complete desktop package with a lifestyle Bose Companion 3 speaker system and an 8ms 19-inch LCD panel (NEC PV900). You can check out the rest of the system configuration in the table below.