Aopen EZ65...

[jon bda]

Hey all, got the chance to pick one of these up cheap, which i'm planning to replace my kids current PC with. Just wanted to know if anyone here has had or is running one, and how quiet/good the standard cooling is?.
:)

[Cable Monkey]

I bought one a while ago, and have just sat down after putting it together. First impresssions are good, it loaded without problems and seems to be quite good. It has a cooling system that ramps up with temperature and was able to run a Prescott without being excessively noisy. I would imagine a Northwood would hardly break into a sweat. At full throttle, the system is noisy and not so easy to silence as a Shuttle. Overall its build quality is lower than a Shuttle (the reason I chose my SB61G2 over it when I bought them both) but not bad, and its layout is less cluttered.

Its spec is as follows, use is as an office and internet machine:

Aopen EX65II
3 gig Prescott
512 (2*256) meg Corsair value ram (CL 2.5)
Radeon 9200SE
NEC ND3520 DVD+/-RW
Samsung Spinpoint 160gig
Floppy drive
Acer 17 inch TFT

The new owner should be happy with it. :)

[jon bda]

Cheers mate, looking at it the older model isn't compatible with Prescott chips so it would have to be a Northy. I was thinking of aiming for something like...

Aopen EZ65
2.6/2.8C Northwood
1x 512meg Twinmoss PC3200 (already got, would like to add another stick)
9700 Pro (already got)
black LG combo drive (already got)
120gig SATA Samsung/Seagate (to replace the current 80gig IDE Maxtor)

...then that would have to do them for a while. The next upgrade would prolly be a low end X800 when they come down in price a bit more later on in the year.
:)

[vdorta]

My son and I just put together one of these gems as a Media Center for his Home Theater, with a Pentium 4 2.8 Northwood. I suggest you flash the latest BIOS and download and install the SilentTek 2 utility here (http://aopen.jp/tech/download/utility/index.html) (for some reason it isn't on the EZ65 list but elsewhere it says it's compatible with it), set it to "Aopen recommended setting" and just give it some room around for airflow. It is wonderful and probably the quietest SFF on the market except for the new Aopen EY855-II Pentium M.