Bearing in mind that these motherboards are intended to take laptop processors, the ability to review them is few and far between. A few months back we took a look at Aopen's XC Cube MZ855-II, which featured the 855 chipset. While they may be vastly the same, the motherboards on trial today differ in one key area structurally - the 915 chipset, and, for our purposes, it's updated graphics engine. Let's see if it can't give the new board
Test Setup:
- Pentium M 755 2.0GHz
- 512MB DDR400 Crucial Ballistix
- Intel Extreme Graphics 2 32MB allocated to graphics
- 32GB Maxt4or HDD
- Windows XP with SP2
- DirectX 9.0c
- AOpen 16x ODD
As you can see, the integrated graphics engines REALLY aren't suited toward any kind of gaming. While there are indeed gains from stepping from the 855 to the 915, it wouldn't make much difference in your slideshow gaming experience. Now, this board has one advantage to it's predecessor, and while this advantage may have drawbacks, it's one nonetheless - there is a capability of dropping any PCI-E Video card in here, meaning that if you wanted to put down the cash for a card such as ATI's All in Wonder 2006 Edition, you could retain the HDTV support, while adding a full tuner and pumping up the gaming performance, quietly to boot.
