AMS e-Cube EG65 Review - Assembly Complete
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Manufacturer: | AMS |
| Product: | e-Cube EG65 |
Price: | USD$329 MSRP |
Availability: | NOW |
Reviewed By: | Jim "Justi" Miller |
Review Date: | August 2003 |
AMS e-Cube EG65 Barebones System Review
ASSEMBLED:
Before we dig into the benchmarks, let's take a look at what we've built...
Let There be Light:
AMS decided to take the "coolness" to a new level by adding an adjustable blue LED bar on the front of the case, and a blue LED fan for the CPU cooler. Between the two the case is lit nicely.
In the thumbnails you can see the blue bar at the bottom of the front of the case clearly during the day, and the CPU fan LED is clearly seen in the image on the right. To control the brightness of the LED bar on the front there is a control that looks like a volume wheel right on the front of the case that controls the intensity of the light..
This was definitely a nice touch, very sweet. The lights are bright enough to see during the day, and at night they look absolutely stellar.
BENCHMARKING:
We're going to benchmark this system a bit differently than we normally benchmark something. Instead of comparing it to something else, we're going to compare it to itself. We're going to benchmark this system with three different video solutions. The on-board video, an MSI 64MB GeForce4 Ti4200, and with a FIC Radeon 9800 Pro. This should show you the level of performance you can expect from this system and answer the ultimate question, if it's right for you.
I'll recap the system as we've got it configured here.
SYSTEM:
- AMS EG65 e-cube Bare Bones System
- Intel Pentium4 2.4c CPU
- 512MB OCZ PC3200 Platinum Memory (2x256MB)
- Maxtor 60GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
VIDEO CARDS COMPARED:
- Intel Extreme Graphics 2 On-board Video
- MSI 64MB GeForce4 Ti4200
- FIC Radeon 9800 Pro
Alright, let's get on with the benchmarks.
SiSoft Sandra Max3 Benchmarking Software:
SiSoft Sandra is a synthetic benchmark that will look at a plethora of different system functions. While we hate to have to rely on synthetic benchmarks, Sandra has provided us a solid comparison platform that you can compare to your existing system.
For these benchmarks only we've compared the results achieved with our e-cube to those which we achieved with or gBOX running a 2.4b Pentium4 CPU. The reason we did this is to show the basically identical systems except for the motherboard chipset and the front side bus of the CPU. The 2.4b operates on a 533MHz system bus compared to the 800MHz system bus of our e-cube system. Bare in mind that these are synthetic marks but something to ponder...
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark:
CPU Multimedia Benchmark:
CPU Memory Bandwidth Benchmark:
We can see that, at least via these Sandra synthetic benchmark results, the Springdale chipset and 2.4c with their 800MHz system bus makes a big difference. The largest variance is seen in the memory bandwidth which is to be expected with the memory running a full 66% higher bus speed than that of the 2.4b CPU. We've seen these deviations when benchmarking full size motherboards so it doesn't surprise me a great deal to see the same hold true for these two top of the line SFF boxes. All the same as you can see, the scores turned in by this e-cube match what you'd expect from a full size system, so a very nice start for the e-cube. When compared with the scores we achieved by running this same 2.4c at stock speeds in our ABIT IS7 the scores are almost identical.
Let's move on to PCMark2002 and some 3D benchmarks on page six....
Next: Benchmarking >>
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