AOpen XC Cube EX915

The frequency/voltage control menu gives us several nice options.  The CPU frequency range is 100 all the way to 400.  Running at a 400MHz setting is a pipe dream in case you were wondering.  What was surprisingly absent here was any adjustment for the CPU voltage. 

  

What was present in the voltage adjustment department was the Northbridge and memory.  Heaven forbid upping the voltage on an already scaldingly hot Northbridge.

  

Performance

In order to give the AOpen EX915 a lap around the track we set things up with our current benchmarking suite.  This consists of PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004, Content Creation 2004, SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Code Creatures. 

As a point of reference, for the productivity benchmarks we compared it to the results Brian got with the Shuttle SB81P cube.  This is not exactly an apples to apples comparison but close enough.  Brian's test bed used the ultra low latency Corsair memory and an IDE hard drive while the test bed used in this review used standard Corsair memory but a SATA hard drive.  With the gaming benches we will compare the onboard video performance with the performance obtained with the XC-Cube equipped with a PCI-Express video card. 

All tests are the result of five runs per bench per configuration.  The respective highest and lowest scores are thrown out and the remaining three averaged which is what you see here.

Test Bed(s)

AOpen

• Intel Prescott 2.8GHz LGA775

• Maxtor 80gb SATA HDD

• (2) 256mb DIMMs Corsair XMS3500

• Sony DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive

• Windows XP Professional with all patches and service packs installed.

• HIS Radeon X600XT (in game benches only)

Shuttle

• Shuttle SB81P

• Intel Prescott 2.8GHz LGA775

• Maxtor Fireball 20GB IDE HDD

• 1gb kit Corsair TwinX PC3200XL Pro

• Asus 52X CD-Rom

• Onboard VGA

Results

PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation 2004 will start out our office productivity testing.  Business Winstone 2004 runs a suite of many popular office programs, measuring their speed and generating an overall score.  The programs it uses are Microsoft Access 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft FrontPage 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002, Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003 and WinZip 8.1.  I'd say this is a fairly encompassing office measure.

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The EX915's outsides
Pg 3 - The EX915's insides
Pg 4 - BIOS
Pg 5 - Testing ~ Office Productivity
Pg 6 - Testing ~ Office Productivity and Gaming
Pg 7 - Testing ~ Gaming  /  Conclusion