Verdict: This is the best Pentium 4 small form factor system we've seen so far
The marketplace for small form-factor (SFF) PCs currently has all the dignity, innovation and good intentions of gold-rush era Yukon. There's gold in them there little cubes, and manufacturers know it. Unfortunately, this means that some companies are speedily releasing SFF PCs with questionable designs and features. Fortunately, the AOpen entry into this burgeoning market, the XC Cube, has more substance than most.
The XC Cube is similar in size to the Shuttle XPC range of SFF PCs, and AOpen supplies it with either an Athlon XP-compatible nForce2 motherboard, or a Pentium 4-compatible board. Our E265 XC Cube review system sported the latter and, as the name implies, it's based around the excellent Intel 865 chipset. AOpen has opted to use the 865G version, which features integrated graphics in the shape of Extreme Graphics 2. Despite its name, the Extreme GPU isn't up to anything radical, although it performs well enough in general Windows applications. Fortunately, the AOpen motherboard has an AGP 8x slot so you're not stuck with the on-board graphics. The slot's placement near the edge of the board means it will only accommodate a single slot-wide card, though. In addition to this, the XC also features on-board LAN and the ubiquitous Realtek AC97 chip provides 5.1 surround sound.
While this features list might appear to be a simple copy of the XPC template, spend any amount of time with the XC Cube and a number of innovations become obvious. Firstly, the XC is very user friendly. As the small form factor market expands, manufacturers are obviously hoping to broaden their customer bases. To this end, AOpen is pushing the ease of the XC Cube's 'out-of-the-box' experience. While it's not quite as spectacular as an out-of-body experience, it does mean the XC Cube is very well mannered for what's essentially a DIY PC kit. Unscrew the bracket that holds the AGP and PCI backplates in place, and it swings neatly out of the way so it doesn't become one of those pieces that are inevitably lost after building a PC. Then there's the very stylish front, with its integrated stealth bezels for drives, simplified controls (only one oversized power button and one LED) and a good, if slightly too 'nannyfied', installation manual.
Technically, the XC Cube is designed with a lot of neat flourishes, such as gigabit LAN. Flip down the cover to the front connection panel and you'll find a rich vein of ports, including the usual USB and headphone/microphone sockets, but more surprisingly - and a boon to digital video enthusiasts - two FireWire ports (powered and unpowered), as well as an optical S/PDIF output. Not all of the design touches are entirely beneficial, though. The stealth bezel for the optical drive looks great but we had trouble with our test drive, a Samsung SM-348 DVD/CD-RW. The drive's rounded bezel and eject button didn't line up with the fascia's eject button.
The XC's cooling solution, a crucial part of building a successful SFF PC, turns out to be the best technical innovation. Shuttle cools the CPU in its XPCs using heatpipes and a radiator, which many of its imitations also use. The EPoX Mini Me SFF, which we reviewed last month, uses fans to cool a heatsink, and as a result it's rather noisy.
AOpen has also opted to go down the fan-cooled route. The CPU is cooled by a large heatsink with a copper base that has an 80mm fan attached to one side, which blows cold air through its fins and out of the case's side vent.
Rather unusually, the internal organisation of the XC Cube demands that you mount the hard drive upside down, so that the metal top, which heats up during use, is pointed directly at the two RAM sockets just a few centimetres beneath it. Couple this with a passively cooled Northbridge, and we really thought the XC Cube would suffer from heat problems, and we would need to set its 80mm fan to maximum speed.
But the XC Cube proved us wrong. For a couple of seconds, when the XC Cube first starts up, the fan does indeed let you know what it's capable of at top speed, screaming away like a clutch of lottery winners. Fortunately, the AOpen SilentTek technology soon puts paid to the fan's clamour. The XC Cube scales the fan's rpms back, balancing the speed with readings from a temperature probe that's cleverly positioned in the centre of the CPU ZIF socket. You can also tweak the settings to fine tune cooling performance using a bundled Windows utility. AOpen makes a range of computer products compatible with SilentTek, from fans and motherboards to optical drives and graphics cards.
In our 'Silent and Fast' feature, which examined silencing your PC, we kitted a whole desktop PC out with AOpen products, and it was considerably quieter than a generic computer. While filling a whole desktop PC with AOpen kit was a considerable undertaking, SilentTek's benefits are far more apparent in an SFF system. There are fewer fans and drives to control and a smaller space in which to limit noise. As a result, the XC Cube's acoustics are excellent. It managed to dispel our reservations about its thermal design by being consistently quiet and fast.
PERFORMANCE
We've reviewed a number of Intel Pentium 4 SFF systems, and at stock speeds, the XC Cube was a mere 2 per cent slower than the Abit DigiDice. Despite the unusual method of mounting the hard drive and the deceptively simple HSF, the XC Cube clearly doesn't have any thermal throttling issues. It performed spot on for a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 on an 865 motherboard, coping well with a variety of multimedia tasks.
The only letdown was, of course, the on-board graphics. Slapping Extreme on the chip is akin to putting a big X marks the spot for treasure and adventure in the middle of a map of Stevenage. It's totally misleading, as the chip is useless for gaming. As with other 865G PCs, the XC Cube failed to complete our Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory test. When we added a Hercules Prophet Radeon 9800, the XC zipped through it. It didn't quite strike gold though, returning a result of 34.1fps - about 4fps slower than the EPoX MiniMe.
When we initially tried to overclock the XC Cube, we tried running it without the case on, just to get a feel for internal temperatures. The XC failed to cope with a FSB anywhere past 210MHz, which was less than impressive, and when we turned it off, the hard drive was almost too hot to touch. However, it's testament to the precision of the design that when we tried again with the cover on, the XC proved to be an overclocker of the highest order. The case clearly helps the airflow work in a very set way, and despite managing to blast the FSB open to a massive 250MHz, the disk and RAM were relatively cool when we took the XC apart . With a 250MHz FSB, we got absolutely huge memory bandwidth and a CPU speed of 3.2GHz. It's no surprise that the performance results - video encoding in particular - were stunning, although the XC couldn't quite top the ludicrous overclockability standard set by the 875P-based Shuttle SB75G2.
CONCLUSION
The cool, black Shuttle XPC SB75G2 has sat proudly on the Custom PC Elite for a couple of months, but the AOpen EZ65 XC Cube has ended its reign. Although the Shuttle is faster at both stock and overclocked frequencies, it's not that much quicker than the XC, doesn't have quite the same level of features and is far more expensive. Put simply, this is the best Pentium 4 small form factor system we've seen so far, and at under £200, it's a bargain - it might not be gold, but the rush should start now.
