16, Jan, 2025
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AOpen XC Cube AV EA915

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The XC Cube may have a modern housing, but its features haven’t caught up yet.
AOpen’s EA915 is the latest in its XC Cube AV small form factor series, refreshed to utilise Intel’s 915G chipset. The case has four USB 2.0 ports (two front, two back), three FireWire ports (one back, two front), S/PDIF in/out, front and back audio/mic jacks, VGA/composite out, Gigabit LAN, serial and parallel ports and PS2 mouse/keyboard ports. It also has a 7-in-l card reader and front controls for operating in Instant-On mode. This lets the machine function as a basic AV box without booting into the main OS.
The 915G chipset brings some great features, such as LGA775 processor support, dual-channel DDR RAM, integrated Intel GMA 900 accelerator, PCI Express and four Serial ATA ports. The EA915 supports Pentium 4 Prescott CPUs up to 3.6GHz, up to 2GB of RAM and Serial ATA RAID arrays. Unfortunately, it only has a Realtek 5.1 audio codec instead of the Intel HD 7.1 standard. It has one PCI Express and one standard PCI expansion slot.
Internal space is limited to one 5.25in and one 3.5in mounting. A 275W PSU is fitted, which is fine for the basic components, but the internal cooling isn’t great. There’s a dedicated extraction fan for the heatsink, and ventilation holes on the right side panel to maximise airflow, with more in the left panel to cool the expansion cards. However, space is limited once the internals are mounted and cabled, and the PSU fan is the only cooling option, potentially causing heat issues.
The EA915 is bundled with Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE), remote control and IR receiver. It also has an AOpen P179 TV tuner card with MPEG-II encoding and antenna inputs, but there aren’t any composite inputs. Video output clarity isn’t bad using composite output, but you’ll need an expansion card for DVI or S-Video quality.
To turn this into a decent MCE machine, you’d need to outlay an extra $700-$800 (Pentium 4 LGA775 3GHZ, 512MB PC3200 RAM, 200GB Serial ATA HDD, GeForce 6200), bringing the total to around $1,500. The XC Cube series was designed before MCE was available and the Instant-On feature is now found on many systems, but AOpen has made no improvement other than the upgraded chipset. These factors, combined with poor cooling and an underpowered PSU, make the expense hard to justify.

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