Verdict: A roomy G965 bare bones system but there's no overclocking.
It's been three years since we last saw an Asus Terminator bare bones and, like the movies, it's now at version three.
Having refused to see 'Rise of the Machines', since it was directed by the guy responsible for the spurious lie-fest 'U-571', we're going to rely on IMDB for the jokes to get this review's pun quotient to the requisite level.
Just as the female Terminator in T3 looked a lot better than either of the burly men in T2, Asus' new bare bones is an aesthetic improvement over the square, black, bulky Terminator 2. A silver panel at the front slides down to reveal USB and mini-FireWire ports, media card slots, optical S/PDIF in, and headphone and microphone ports. It also reveals the eject button for the machine's single optical drive bay. With the front panel closed, hiding the eject button and ports, the Terminator 3 looks very sleek. If Asus is making a fair attempt at aping an Apple machine then its catchphrase would surely be 'I'll be Mac'.
Internally, there have been massive changes since the previous Terminator. The Terminator 3 uses a BTX layout that was designed by Intel when it was pushing its NetBurst CPUs before the more efficient, high-performance Core 2 Duo made it largely redundant. There are four DDR2 RAM slots on the motherboard, and the Northbridge is the Intel G965. There's a single 16x PCI-E slot, but it will only take a single-slot graphics card, which pretty much precludes our current favourite graphics cards, as they're all too big. We tried retro-fitting a reference GeForce 8800 GTS with a single-slot backplate but, although there's room for the cooler, the card's PCB is too long and clashes with the Terminator 3's media card controller.
Had we been able to install the card, the cheap and nasty-looking PSU might have caused us some worries, as it's only rated at 250W. It's a standard ATX unit, however, so swapping it out for something meatier wouldn't be difficult, since the Terminator 3's case comes apart easily. Using a medium-sized Philips-head screwdriver, you can dismantle the system in less than three minutes.
Like the previous Terminator, the PSU and hard disk cage flips out once two of the screws are removed. Asus has secured the PSU's cables to convenient points in the chassis with reusable plastic holders, so you'll be able to use these when installing your own PSU. The optical drive cage is separate from the main system chamber, and there's an EIDE cable, and both S-ATA and Molex power inputs close at hand. The motherboard has three S-ATA headers so you can use a S-ATA optical drive with two S-ATA hard disks. There's only a single EIDE port, and the Terminator 3's layout means that EIDE hard disks are all but ruled out. The hard disks stand on their sides in their caddy and, as they're next to the PSU intake fan, they should receive adequate cooling.
We only had to consult the manual twice during our build; once to clarify that the rubber strips on the contact plate of the BTX processor cooling block should be removed (yes, they should), and again to check which sockets to plug our test RAM into in order for it to run in dual-channel mode (the manual doesn't say but, as usual, you should install pairs in identically coloured sockets). With the CPU and memory installed, we only had to install a hard disk, slide the optical drive into its bay and screw it in before reassembling the case. The eject button on the front panel levers a chunky pad onto your optical drive, so when you say, 'Get out' (a line said in all three Terminator films, but by different characters each time), no matter which eject button your chosen optical drive uses, it will reliably spit out the tray.
Despite the fact that Asus has made some effort to route the PSU cables, overall, it's tricky to make the cabling look neat; the Terminator 3 certainly isn't as well planned as your average Shuttle. However, the BTX layout means that your CPU is right at the front of the case, and therefore a priority for receiving cool air, while the Northbridge is also partially cooled. This cool air can't come from the case's fascia, however - a grille just wouldn't look right - so it has to be sucked up through a gap between the plastic fascia and the chassis proper. As our case Labs test showed, an airflow that has to twist through a 90-degree angle twice isn't very efficient, so it's a testament to the quality of the cooler that our test chip managed to level out at 68ûC during testing, with only occasional and brief fan speed increases.
In terms of ports, the Terminator 3 makes its strongest claim for use as a media centre PC. At the rear, there are the usual surround-sound mini-jack outputs, plus a digital S/PDIF out if you'd prefer your speakers to perform the audio decoding. There's a Gigabit Ethernet port, eSATA, four USB ports and a FireWire connection. The single PCI slot could house a twin TV tuner card, or you could fit a PCI-E card into the 16x slot. However, while the space behind the optical drive bay may look like it should be more expansion slots, there would be no way of using them; the motherboard has no USB or FireWire headers, even if Asus did supply them. There's also only a D-SUB output for the on-board graphics, not DVI or HDMI, although there are plenty of slim mid-range graphics cards that offer these.
Performance
As the Terminator 3 uses a G965-based motherboard, its stock performance was always going to be good, although it wasn't as fast as some P965 boards we've seen. The overall score of 1.80 compares reasonably well to the 1.84 of the Asus P5B Premium Vista Edition, considering that the latter is a premium desktop board. However, the BIOS offers hardly any overclocking possibilities. Only the CPU multiplier can be changed, but you'll only be able to increase it with an Extreme Edition CPU. Using such a chip in the Terminator 3 would be almost as silly as sending an outdated male robot back in time to defeat a superior shape-changing female robot in the hope that you could change history.
Conclusion
Although we were initially excited about the idea of the film 'Terminator 3', the more we learned about it, the less we wanted to see it. The same applies to this bare bones. It should have been great, with a G965 chipset and a case that looks spacious enough for a beefy graphics card. However, there are too many compromises. The weedy PSU is forgivable, given that it's a standard ATX unit, but it would be better if the Terminator 3 were shipped without one, so that you could choose what you want. Not being able to fit in a double-slot graphics card means that it won't make a great gaming rig either, and the lack of overclocking was a letdown. That said, at just over £100, the Terminator is cheap, and could be pressed into service as a media machine, even if its stocky dimensions mean that, visually, it doesn't cry out 'take me to your lounge'.
