ECS EZ-Buddie

This overclocking lark is an awful business. Hours and hours spent nudging the BIOS settings, rebooting, soak-testing the new configuration, rebooting, then nudging things further until it all locks up and you need to clear the CMOS memory and start again. But that's why we do it, and if it was easy it wouldn't be fun.

Obviously unaware of this fact, ECS has gone and taken all the entertainment away by producing the EZ-Buddie bare-bones system, with integrated EZ-Watcher hardware and front-panel display. A simple turn of the front panel's knob boosts the FSB and thus the processor speed. The mad fools.

The front-panel display, which looks like a cross between a hi-fi and car dashboard, shows current processor speed and gives an indication of system and CPU temperatures. There are four icons showing motherboard and memory health, plus CD-ROM and hard-disk activity. The faux CPU-speedometer bars, arranged around the numeric frequency display, light progressively as you wind up the CPU Clock control: each bar indicates a frequency of 3 per cent over rated speed, with the final 18 per cent bar flashing red. You can keep going past this, although it's highly unlikely you'll get that far - once you hit the overclocking limits of your hardware and the system freezes, the motherboard automatically resets and clocks down to default speed.

It's interesting to note that not only can you overclock the EZ-Buddie, but also underclock it. This brings the ability to maintain as quiet a system as possible by reducing heat generation and thus the speed of the smart system fans.

The motherboard requires a standard processor heatsink, as opposed to the ICE evaporative heatpipe cooling hardware incorporated into Shuttle XPCs. We found the size of the case led to problems installing large heatsinks. The height of the Arctic Cooling cooler meant it was nearly touching the base of the CD-ROM drive, seriously impeding airflow into the fan, consequently turning the front-panel temperature monitor red and causing the overheating alarm to kick in. The Zalman coolers were simply too wide to fit into the available space.

Ironically, replacing the Arctic Cooling cooler with the smaller heatsink supplied with the EZ-Buddie resulted in a much lower temperature and greater ability for overrating the processor. We pushed a 2.4GHz Northwood Pentium 4 up to 2.65GHz, raising the FlasK DivX encoding performance by nearly 10 per cent - proof that overclocking can be a hit-and-miss affair. It's worth noting that excessive underclocking also creates stability problems, as taking the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 below about 1GHz resulted in lockup and an automatic system reset.

The case itself is very compact, measuring just 161 x 310 x 260mm (W x D x H) - a little deeper and taller than a Shuttle XPC case but considerably narrower. To squeeze a whole PC's worth of components in there, the power supply has been moved offboard. Inside the case is a pre-fitted custom motherboard with an SiS651 chipset, AGP slot and single PCI and CNR slots sharing a backplate space.

While the EZ-Buddie looks great, the impression of style doesn't extend into the tactile realm. The front panel is plastic, including the reset, power and CD eject buttons and the CPU Clock control. The case's aluminium shell is also quite thin, as is the metal of the chassis. The CD eject button is electronic and connected to the motherboard, rather than being a mechanical arrangement designed to prod the CD-ROM's own eject button. This is good news, but the Plextor CD-RW drive we used for testing had a tendency to catch on the spring-loaded front-panel flap when the tray retracted. The width of the machine also forces the drive to be mounted vertically, leading to the odd comedy moment as CDs dropped out of the tray and rolled across the floor.