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Introduction

Small Form Factors are all the rage these days. Forget the BTX standard is pushing, the big thing in the computing industry right now is Flex ATX. SFFs and Flex ATX started off as a neat little product from Shuttle but has exploded into an industry wide phenomenon in the past year. Nearly every single OEM has some sort of SFF PC out.

Adoption at the beginning was a bit on the slower side due to the fact that older chipsets were generally used; the last time we took a look at SFFs was way back in the summer of 2002. At this point we were looking at i845 chipsets on the Intel side and SiS740s on the AMD side. The main problem was not just the slower chipset, but the lack of an AGP port which made SFFs of that era inadequate for gaming. The ease of setup were hard to ignore though; drop in a processor, memory, hard drive and CDROM and voila, a fully functional system. Nearly every system back then featured integrated video and sound already. This made SFFs interesting for non gaming applications namely desktop work and maybe as a HTPC. Another factor plaguing SFFs at this time was stability. Flex ATX was still relatively new at this point and I guess manufacturers had not quite worked out all the design kinks.

Things began to brighten up for the enthusiast with the introduction of the SS51 from Shuttle which included an AGP port in a SFF box for the first time. The ball really began rolling when state of the art chipsets like the NForce2 found their way into SFF boxes. Since then, NForce 3 boards for the Athlon 64 and i865 boards for the P4 have also been introduced.

The AOpen EZ65 XC Cube

Today we take a look at a SFF from a relatively new player on the SFF market. AOpen is no stranger to our labs as we have taken a look at some of their wares recently with a pretty innovative case, two (1, 2) Athlon XP boards and also their P4 i875 board. Today we will look at one of AOpen's SFFs, the EZ65 XC Cube, based off of the i865G chipset. There is also a EY65 available that is based off of the venerable NForce 2 chipset. AOpen along with other OEMS certainly have high hopes for SFFs. According to a report from DigiTimes, AOpen is planning to ship 500,000 SFFs PCs this year, not a small number to sneeze at. Margins on motherboards are also down and many OEMs are banking on SFFs to pick up some of the slack. With the lessons in why everyone is suddenly so interested in SFFs aside, we take a look at the star of this review, the EZ65.