Verdict: Hard to build, then there's that pointless knob ...

The EZ-Buddie has made a bit of a name for itself, and not for the right reasons. In a market where differentiation has become increasingly hard to achieve, ECS aims for knob-twiddling notoriety via a dial that's intended to make overclocking a doddle.

At least, it would be, if you could overclock the EZ-Buddie at all. As there's a knob present, there are no overclocking facilities in the BIOS. We only managed to get the EZ-Buddie running smoothly at a meagre 177MHz FSB - just 7 per cent faster than the 166MHz default. This merely lifted performance from an embarrassing 0.93 in our Media Benchmarks to a vaguely respectable 0.99. And as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory wouldn't even run at either frequency, the knob is clearly of no real use whatsoever.

The EZ-Buddie is tricky to build too. The DIMM sockets, EIDE cables and jumper to set the default FSB are hidden under the drive cage, making access difficult. The jumper isn't mentioned in the extremely limited documentation, which bangs on about the overclocking dial on the front and doesn't even cover the motherboard layout and settings. To make matters worse, the CPU HSF is difficult to fit as well.

Considering the stunning overclockability of the AOpen EZ18 XC Cube, the ECS EZ-Buddie D1V7-2 is a sore disappointment. With its flimsy build quality, external PSU that provides just two Molex connectors, and poor performance, this Buddie's definitely no friend of ours.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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