Internals II
AOpen's choice to go with the MCP-T Southbridge is a wise one. Its feature integration minimises the need for external chip controllers. However, for the S.B to route its function set to the various jacks and ports littered around the chassis, PHY (physical layers) are needed. Agere's FW803 transceiver, pictured centrally, links up to FireWire ports on both front and back. Next door and even smaller is Realtek's RTL8201BL Ethernet PHY. Realtek's also used, this time with the ALC650 CODEC, to provide routing for the MCP-T's lovely audio. The main feature missing, we feel, is the lack of SATA support. The MCP-T doesn't support it and AOpen's declined to use a discrete controller.
AOpen uses a 220w that's cooled by an 80mm fan. That's good thinking on AOpen's part. Larger fans can spin at lower RPMs and still deliver reasonable airflow. The end result is a quieter system. Connections-wise, 3 molex and a single floppy connector is enough for EZ18. Just note that it has a small switch that allows voltages to be toggled between 110v and 230v. Ensure that it's set correctly before you boot. I don't want to tell you what might happen if you don't.
The tray can hold 2 3.5" devices and a single 5.25". That's three of the four power connectors accounted for. The remaining one will probably service a high-end AGP card. The drop-down nature of the front panels makes it difficult to house a card reader in the upper 3.5" bay, so there's an opportunity missed.
We'd have preferred it if AOpen had pre-attached and routed the ATA cables. It just makes the task of installation easier. We're not quite sure why there's a molex-to-SATA convertor and SATA cable. Another case of a manufacturer chucking in a generic bundle without paying attention to the particular model. What's nice to see are the small extras, such as a cloth to clean the shiny cover and caps for the EZ18's feet. Documentation, whilst being very colourful, is poor. A thin instruction manual covers both the Intel and AMD XC cubes in brief detail. There's literally nothing written about the BIOS, features or settings. It presumes a prior level of knowledge on the user's part. A fold-out installation guide simply refers to how one should plug the keyboard and mouse into associated ports!.
AOpen does redeem the bundle somewhat with a decent installation and feature CD, although the drivers are hopelessly out of date (mid-2003). SilentTek, AOpen's nifty OS-based hardware monitoring utility provides useful information on voltage lines and can also be used to control fan speeds. EZRestore, assuming that the appropriate settings have been enabled in BIOS and a restore point's been created, allows one to restore the OS to an earlier point.
