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Introduction

Over the past couple months we have taken a look at a good number of Small Form Factor systems here at Neoseeker. Each manufacturer has taken a different approach to its design philosophy. The FIC Condor was an engineering marvel while Soltek's Qbic was one of the most practical systems all around. We have seen the evolution of SFF systems from low end boards with no AGP support to compelling full featured systems that rival their full sized desktop equivalents. Manufacturers have gotten behind the SFF wave by improving in nearly every area; the finish of the SFF systems are very good, noise is down and some have increased their expandability. While the various SFF systems we have taken a look at were all very good in their own right, at the end of the day, they were still computers.

Although SFF systems are great, one of the gripes that we have is that the vision of the SFF system is based largely upon the initial Shuttle design; the classic cube shape has been the basic building block of nearly every single company. While it has been refined and improved upon, there are few companies that have gone out on a limb to do something different. FIC deserved major kudos for their work with Intel on the Condor for that reason.

It has been a few months since we last looked at AOpen's EZ65, a SFF system that we thought very highly of. Today we take a look at AOpen's XC Cube AV Edition, a SFF system, with a twist; it also doubles as a multimedia center with Instant On capabilities for media playback and software to give it PVR capabilities. Instant On has been a fairly hot topic of late with competing solutions from both Nvidia's nStant and Toshiba's Qosmio. Unfortunately, both these technologies are limited to laptops right now, and fortunately for AOpen, they have one of the few instant-on desktop solutions that we are aware of.