Aopen XC Cube EU965 review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 19 Feb 2007

Price when reviewed: £245

Supplier: http://www.zomp.net

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

AOpen's XC Cube EU965 is the second-most expensive system in the group, but it's also the best looking.

The black chassis feels well made. The instructions are mainly detailed, but strangely don't explain how to install the processor cooler. This task is fiddly as the rear screws are obscured by the front-panel cables, which also block access to the PCI Express x1 slot.

The EU965 has two 31/2in drive bays and one 51/4in bay, and one IDE and three SATA ports. This means you can fit two SATA hard disks and a SATA or IDE optical drive, but you can't fit both an IDE optical drive and IDE hard disk. Lining up the optical drive with the front of the case is fiddly, as you have to make sure the eject button is in just the right place.

When fitted with our GeForce 7800GTX graphics card, the EU965's scores in our 3D benchmarks were marginally the best in the group. It ran Call of Duty 2 at 28.8fps and produced 64.7fps in Doom 3. Its results in our 2D tests were strange, though. Its overall score of 138 is 10 per cent slower than the Socket LGA775 Shuttle XPC SD32G2, but when we ran the tests with a dedicated graphics card installed, the two produced similar scores. There seems to be a problem with the Cube's Intel GMA3000 integrated graphics driver.

The XC Cube EU965 looks great, but it performs inconsistently and is expensive. Shuttle's SD32G2 makes a better gaming PC.

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