Verdict: Comes up smelling of roses - Sort of
The success of the Shuttle XPC family has spearheaded a lot of interest in diminutive, high-performance PCs.
Whereas an XPC's interior is a precisely ordered, logical workspace, the DigiDice's is a nightmare. Abit has opted to use fiddly plastic tacks instead of standard screws to hold the cooling system onto the case, and the cabling paths aren't clear. Building the DigiDice is a battle of wits and dexterity, which will probably reduce the average system builder to a primitive Neanderthal at least once. It's a shame it's so difficult to manoeuvre inside, as the DigiDice actually has space for two optical drives, two hard drives and a double-width AGP card. As the motherboard's Intel Extreme Graphics 2 controller isn't up to the gaming challenge, we used a Hercules Radeon 9800, which went in without a problem.
Aside from the lamentable onboard graphics, the Flex ATX motherboard (220mm x 205mm) is feature rich. It's based around the Intel 865G chipset, with 5.1 audio, 10/100 LAN and S-ATA support. Abit knows how to make fast-performing boards, and the DigiDice did very well in our benchmarks. The Radeon 9800 graphics powered the DigiDice to almost 40fps in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. A good game of Wolfenstein is a good way to calm down after a fraught hardware installation, and the 2D benchmark results were just as calming, outpacing the similarly specified Soltek Qbic EQ3401M that we tested last month.
However, performance comes at a price, and the DigiDice isn't a quiet machine because there are three fans. Working together, they make the DigiDice sound twice the size it really is, but they do mean that it can cope with some overclocking, which Abit positively encourages you to try. The dial on the front might make the DigiDice look like a kitchen appliance, but is actually used for overclocking. The dial has five settings, each of which adds five per cent to the FSB. It makes the dark art of overclocking available to everyone but it doesn't up the CPU core voltage or allow you to lock the PCI and AGP bus. In practice, we could only get the machine to boot with the FSB up from 200 to 210MHz.
The fascia's large blue LCD displays a variety of fan speed, temperature and voltage readings, which you can select using a supplied utility. Abit has also included a remote control with the DigiDice. Fortunately, it's of a much better design and build than the main unit, and allows you to control DVD and audio CD playback. Abit also includes perhaps the strangest extra we've ever seen: a small bottle of rose-scented oil, and a small cup to heat it in which clips onto the rear radiator. It's not often you get to say that a PC stinks, but this is one time when it's justified.
CONCLUSION
For an SFF PC to succeed against standard midi-tower systems, there has to be a lot of ingenious design work going on.
The DigiDice, sadly, is just infernal. It might save you space, but its high price, clunky build quality and unintuitive internal design means that it's something we really can't recommend.
