|  The Ice Cube's case includes a molded handle on it which makes it easy to just pickup and go when you need to bring your PC somewhere. The handle is fairly sturdy, and even with a fully loaded PC, it should hold without any problems. Depending on the components, the average weight of a fully assembled Ice Cube should be no more than 15lbs. Undoing a couple screws at the base of the handle, near the front of the PC, will allow you to easily access the interior. One thing to point out is to remember to tighten the screws before picking up the Ice Cube once you're done working on it. I mentioned that the Ice Cube is a little easier than some other past SFFs I've looked at when it comes to accessing the case's interior. The issue I had with other SFFs was the case cover made up the sides and back, so I always found it a little tricky removing the cover when I needed to work on these PCs. The removable side windows, and the swing open top is a lot easier to work with in my opinion. Being a slightly larger SFF, there is plenty of space inside to work as well. The internal hard drive and optical drive rack is removed by loosening a few screws and pulling it out. You can fit two 3 1/2" devices and a 5 1/4" device, though I'd hesitate about putting two hard drives as the heat generated may be too much for the Ice Cube's cooling to handle. The Ice Cube uses an efficient aluminum heatsink with an embedded copper core. This is packaged in a small white box, with some instructions, thermal paste, and Pentium 4 heatsink clips. The quality of the heatsink is quite good, and although it isn't based on the traditional fin design, the spiral pattern does allow for plenty of fins, hence surface area, for the heat to dissipate. The base of the heatsink is flat, though it isn't polished like many manufacturers like to make them now. There are three fans that handles the cooling chores for the Ice Cube. For the case, the PSU fan performs double duty by cooling the PSU and venting some of the warm air out of the case through the rear. There is a turbine fan located just beneath the PSU that handles the majority of the case cooling. It does a fair job of moving air, as you can feel it blowing out the back, and it runs relatively quiet. | The fan on the CPU heatsink is of the LED variety, and casts a blue glow throughout the case. The fan seems slightly more powerful than the stock Intel fan, but it is very noisy. The noise levels are about the same as Y.S. Tech's TMD fans, and the noise levels will be compounded should you decided to place this SFF on your desktop. Replacing the included heatsink and fan with Intel's stock solution cuts the sound levels immensely, and although it isn't silent, it is not as disruptive either.Trust me you will be better off just replacing the fan and heatsink as there is only 1/2 inch of room between the cpu fan and the hard drive. The Ice Cube IC-VL67 uses a temperature controlled Chyang Fun power supply.Being temperature controlled, the PSU will spin down the fan so they won't be running at full speed when there is minimal load. |
| At 220W, this PSU is the beefiest I've seen in SFF PCs. It's not all about Wattage though, as the rails are also very important. The 12V rail is powered with 12A, whereas past SFFs we've seen were running on 10A. The extra power is nice, and with the stock PSU, you have four connections (two floppy, two standard four-pin). In a likely scenario, one four pin will go into an optical drive, and one will go into the hard drive. The floppy connection goes into a floppy, and if you have a Radeon 9500/9700, you have a connection for that. However, high end FX owners, and 9800 owners are going to want to keep those molex splitters that came with your card handy as you'll have no more standard molex connections if you happen to fall into the above scenario. The motherboard is a six-layer design, based on the Intel 865G chipset. The features mirror that of the 865PE Springdale chipset, except the "G" designates the inclusion of the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 into its architecture.This graphics controller won't cut it for the majority of todays graphically intense 3D games, and will no doubt cause users grief when trying to play Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 when they are released. The IDE and floppy connections are located near the power connections, and getting to them is fairly easy if you only need one connection. Because the board is smaller than a typical ATX board, all three connections are right up against each other. If you have a couple cables going in, getting to the third connection is a little inconvenient. The IDE and floppy proximity issues are alleviated by the inclusion of a SATA connection. This is nice, as SATA drives are becoming more popular. However, between the SATA and the PCI slot is the CMOS jumper. In no small words, this jumper is in a terrible position as it is extremely frustrating to get to. Out of the five times I needed to get to it, at least three times it fumbled out of my hands. A pull-tab jumper would have made a much better choice. The CPU socket supports any Socket 478 processor, and uses Intel's standard heatsink retention scheme. Heatsink support will vary, but this area is directly below the HDD rack, so don't expect to hook up a Swiftech MCX4000 with an 80mm fan below it. The included cooler fits, naturally, as well as the stock Intel cooler. The 865G is cooled by a nice aluminum heatsink with a fan. It doesn't produce much noise at all, and active cooling is a good idea; more so if you choose to use the IGP (ugh).
Onboard sound and networking are handled by a couple of familiar Realtek products. The ALC650 sound controller features six channel sound support and compliant with AC'97 2.2 specifications. From past experience, the quality is decent, though CPU usage is higher than other onboard controllers I've experienced. The RTL8100BL is a 10/100M Fast Ethernet controller. It is a PCI based solution, so if other PCI based products are hogging the system bus, performance of the controller will be affected.
I should point out that FIC follows Intel's i865 guidelines, meaning, you won't find any Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) enhancements here. This is a bit of a downer, but you can all blame Intel when looking for a direction to point your wrath. FIC uses a Pheonix AwardBIOS, which is my personal favorite. Though you have some ability to do some system tweaks, we'll soon see that a lot of items tweakers are accustomed to are not present. In the Advanced Chipset Features, this is where most of the system tweaking will be found. By setting the DRAM timings to manual, you can make some adjustments if your ram can handle it. You can also set your memory frequency to as low as DDR266 should you be using older PC2100 ram. Integrated Peripherals is where you can enable and disable a number of onboard devices. I was quite satisfied with the performance of the onboard stuff, and chose to leave most items enabled, though if you have a sound card you're satisfied with for example, you can disable the Realtek sound controller.
Frequency/Voltage Control is typically where enthusiasts have the most fun when digging into the overclocking. Like I said, typically. Maybe it's the business people on the box or something, but you'll find ZERO options for overclocking, let alone any voltage adjustments. This is a shame really, but understandable in a way as the small confines of the Ice Cube doesn't allow for any extreme cooling. Generally its a great computer box,Just don't expect to do any real modding with this as there aint much room for it.My system is up and running had some cooling problems due to the stock heatsink and fan,Just put a shorter heats sink and fan in do not use the stock one and you will be fine. |
