Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo P5905 review

Like the AMD-powered NEC, the Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo P5905 is a compact mini-tower that won’t take up much space. They also share elbow room at the very top of our Quietness graphs. But unlike the NEC, the Esprimo has a whisper-quiet DVD drive (dual-layer +R9 and -R9). This is achieved with the company’s own driver called Xontrol, which limits the spin speed of the drive. The price you pay is obvious: it’s noticeably slower when loading up and transferring data.

The Esprimo is also the slowest performer on test. It has a 2.8GHz Pentium D 820, where the other Intel-based machines run 3GHz or 3.2GHz CPUs. Being a business machine, 3D performance isn’t a priority, and the GMA 950 graphics system, part of Intel’s 945G Express chipset, provides sufficient power for said purpose but little more. Of greater significance is the measly 80GB SATA/150 hard disk. NEC includes 120GB more with the i-Select.

Fujitsu-Siemens uses its own European-made D2151-A1 motherboard and a novel case design. The power supply and CPU heatsink share the same fan. It’s part of the PSU assembly, which slots into the middle of the chassis right up to the heatsink, and draws hot air away to a vent in the left-side door.

It’s certainly very quiet and it makes replacing a PSU fairly easy, but you have to lift it out to access internal components such as RAM. Power and drive cables plus encroaching drive cages restrict access to the fourth DIMM socket. There are no such problems with the two PCI slots and two PCI Express slots (1x and 16x). If you need to overcome the modest graphics power, you can add a video card to the latter. And with the hard disk cage turned 90 degrees, it’s easy to slot in another device. Port connections are minimal, though, with only two USB round the back and no FireWire, but at least there are two more USB ports on the front and audio ports for VoIP.

Fujitsu-Siemens has embraced the new environment codes and can recycle 98 per cent of a PC. The Esprimo is fully WEEE-compliant and will be RoHS compliant in January. It’s also designed to be power efficient, although three machines fared slightly better in our idle power consumption test.

All these features should attract businesses, no matter what their size, and note the Esprimo includes Windows XP Professional rather than Home – unlike all the others here. What’s more, Fujitsu-Siemens topped our PC Reliability & Service awards last year. Even though the Esprimo falls behind all the others here for bang-per-buck, it’s a solid choice.