Verdict: Ugly and noisy, a bit like pauline fowler
The EX915G is only the second LGA775 SFF bare bones we've tested, the first being the Shuttle XPC SB81P. The 915G supports DDR memory, so you don't have to fork out for expensive DDR2 modules. And as we've been very impressed with previous AOpen XC Cubes in the past, we were expecting good things.
The case itself is painted with an attractive graphite effect, but this is let down by a fake metal (read silver plastic) grille on the front panel that's a poor attempt at an industrial appearance. This can be easily removed with four self-tapping screws, so you could paint it any colour you like, but it would still look pretty naff.
The power switch is illuminated by a blue LED, while the bottom LED is the hard drive activity indicator.
You can also find the fairly standard headphone and microphone jacks, and USB 2 and FireWire ports on the front panel. There's also an optical output on the front of the case and an optical input on the back. This is a rather strange arrangement, as we'd want the input on the front so we could easily plug in a MiniDisc recorder or such like without having to scrabble around at the back of the case.
Under the hood is an LGA775 motherboard, with the 915G Northbridge and ICH6 Southbridge. The board has one PCI slot and one 16x PCI-E slot. The PCI-E slot is located on the outside edge of the board to stop it hitting the hard drive cage, but this means there's no room for a dual-slot graphics card. However, there is a vent in the side panel next to the slot to ensure the graphics card gets a decent amount of fresh air.
There are two slots for the DDR memory, which are easy to get to, even when all the other components are in place. As the 915G is a recent Intel chipset, the XC Cube also has Intel's HD Audio, and there's a Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet controller too.
Building the XC Cube is pretty straightforward but the manual is aimed at people who have never carried out a simple upgrade before, so it can help out with any confusion. To install the EIDE drives, you need to remove the main cage, which is held in place by two screws. A thumbscrew holds the internal hard drive cage in place, with a Molex power connector nearby for attaching to the hard drive.
There's space for two 3.5in drives and a single 5.25in drive inside the compact chassis. Strangely, despite there being only one EIDE channel on the motherboard, AOpen includes two EIDE cables, neither of which supports a Slave drive. In order to get our two EIDE drives to work, we had to use a different cable and put the hard drive in the floppy cage so the cable would reach. This awkward design, and the presence of four S-ATA ports on the motherboard, shows that the XC Cube was clearly designed with S-ATA drives in mind. So if you want to fit a floppy drive or memory card reader and an EIDE hard drive you're stuffed.
Another problem is that the eject button on our Samsung SM-348 optical drive did not match up with the button on the fascia of the XC Cube.
Strangely, the bundled HSF uses the Socket 478 mounting mechanism rather than the bulky twist lock LGA775 mechanism. This is probably because there simply isn't enough space inside the XC Cube to actually operate a twist lock mechanism.
It will be interesting to see if other motherboard manufacturers catch on to this idea, as we really don't like the twist lock system. The HSF has a large copper base and a side-mounted fan that blows hot air out of the case through a vent in the right side panel. Unfortunately, this cooling system doesn't seem good enough for a heat-generating monster such as our 3.2GHz Pentium 4e test chip.
All the power cables are tied up neatly in an attempt to make airflow as efficient as possible, and the Molex plugs are routed exactly to where you need them. But despite this, the ambient temperature inside the case can get far too high. The cooling system is supposed to pull air through from left to right, using the 60mm fan on the HSF. This should work pretty well, and the Northbridge heatsink is positioned to take advantage of this.
The problem is that our GeForce 6800 GT graphics card pretty much blocked the left air intake, severely reducing the effectiveness of the cooling design. On top of this, we struggled to find enough Molex connections to power our card and had to use a Molex splitter (not supplied). Given that the XC Cube is designed for PCI-E graphics cards, we'd expect the PSU to have a 6-pin PCI-E connector as standard. Admittedly, the cooling system would work much better if you used the on-board 915G graphics, but frankly we'd rather eat chalk.
When we first powered up the XC Cube, the fans were almost silent, but as soon as the CPU started working its temperature very quickly rose towards the 75ûC mark. This triggered the XC Cube to spin up the fans to provide extra cooling, and one fan sped all the way up to 5,600rpm, dramatically increasing noise levels.
We certainly wouldn't recommend overclocking this system and people who like to play games certainly aren't going to want this fan bellowing out at them from inside their PC.
The PSU only outputs 275W, so we were surprised by its ability to cope with everything we put inside the XC Cube. The PSU is rated at 14A on the 12V rail, which is pushing it for a high-end CPU and graphics card, but we didn't notice any instability during testing.
PERFORMANCE
To test the XC Cube we fitted a 3.2GHz Pentium 4e, an Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT graphics card and 1GB of Corsair XMS 4400 memory. With these components, its performance was spot on for a 915G board, which is no real surprise, as there's generally little difference in performance between motherboards based on the same chipset. Interestingly, the score of 1.52 in the TMPGEnc MPEG-2 video encoding test was exactly the same as that of the 865PE-powered AOpen I865PEA-7IF motherboard.
What separates one motherboard or SFF from another is the ability to overclock. Unfortunately, the BIOS offers no control over the CPU voltage, but it does allow you to change the Northbridge and DDR voltage. Considering the lacklustre cooling system, overclocking the XC Cube isn't a real option.
CONCLUSION
We were expecting a lot from the XC Cube, but unfortunately it didn't live up to our expectations. It's packed with all the features we'd expect, but the cooling system isn't up to scratch, it doesn't overclock and it isn't that great to look at.
The main thing in its favour is that it's pretty good value for money, being around £80 less than the Shuttle XPC SB81P. However, the Shuttle has a more powerful PSU, and a far quieter and more effective cooling system, and is a much better choice if you want LGA775 in a small form factor.
