Thoughts
AOpen's EZ18-120 SFF system certainly looks the part, right from the shiny finish, multitude of ports, and minimalist design. It's designed to appeal to a broad a church as possible. Onboard graphics, provided by NVIDIA's nForce2 IGP Northbridge, are more than adequate at providing smooth video playback and decent gaming performance. AOpen keeps options open by including an AGP slot, so if high-octane gaming is your cup of tea, AOpen has it covered.Perhaps the most important internal choice for any SFF system is deciding which chipset to go with. AOpen's, as we know, has opted for AMD's Athlon XP range. The performance blot arrives in the shape of a maximum Front-Side Bus support of 166MHz, thereby limiting the EZ18 to an Athlon XP3000+ processor. It's not slow, obviously, but with cubes now taking AMD's Athlon 64 Model 3400+ and Intel's 3.4GHz Extreme Edition without issue, truly high-end performance is beyond the EZ18's reach. The upside, however, is a lack of cost.
All the usual feature suspects are in place, helped by the excellent integration inherent in the chipset. It's also unobtrusive when in use, helped by a whisper-quiet PSU. So does this make it champion SFF system?. Probably not. Installation is hampered by the CPU socket's silly location, which is right next door to the PSU. Mounting the cooler is an unnecessarily arduous task. Further, the instruction manual is lacking when compared to, say, Shuttle's and we're miffed that a DVI socket was eschewed in favour of a second VGA port. There's also no discrete SATA support. And while we're in full critical mode, pre-attached, pre-routed cabling would have been nice.
We've yet to see a perfect SFF system. AOpen does a lot of things right with the EZ18 - it also does a few things, subjectively speaking, wrong. Worth a look, surely.
