An expensive board, but a fascintating way of getting a powerful, quiet system, especially if you're prepared to tweak.

In the ever bloating world of mini barebones PCs there is a wide range of build quality and internal design to be witnessed. AOpen has been in the market for a while now, and the XC cube edition is one of the better designed systems in an area where quality can vary wildly from brand to brand.

As stated in the introduction, there are only four real TFT panel manufacturers in the world, so it’s no surprise that you come across eerily similar products every now and again, as each OEM supplies displays for a multitude of companies.

Like Samsung, Aopen’s trump card is their ridiculously low price; a CD writer at $49 is pretty hard to beat.

The AOpen DRW4410 performed on average in both performance and features, dropping a few positions given its rather expensive price tag for a single format writer.

The poorest performing GeForce FX 5600 card, AOpen's offering features average performance, most comparable to the mid-point between the 9200 and 9600 graphics adaptors.

One of the stranger-looking bezels we received on a display, the AOpen was another middle-of-the-road performer, returning average results

One of only a handful of non-Intel chipsets we received, AOpen's XCube EZ18 features an NVIDIA nForce2 chipset with support for 266 and 333MHz AMD processors.

Our Labs Winner this month represents what a mini barebones PC should be: it's small yet easily accessible; it's attractive, but has a quality build; and it has all the features you need for a full PC or a media centre.

Built with convenience in mind, this board features six board-mounted USB 2.0 ports, and two more on a rear panel.

With the AX4C Max comes a whopping four SATA ports, which support RAID. The board will also be popular with overclockers with its comprehensive BIOS tweaking features, such as 1MHz stepping for the CPU and AGP/PCI clocks, as well as adjustable voltage for the CPU, AGP/PCI and RAM.

The Ricoh MP5125A-DP drive is actually used by the other DVD+RW supporters, although they rebrand them as their own. AOpen and HP have both taken this route, and use the Ricoh as their base.

Supporting a maximum 12-speed burning, though without BURN-Proof, the AOpen CRW-1232 still manages to put on an outstanding show...

AOpen began its run to glory by topping our 3DMark01 tests with an impressive 14,977 marks in the default resolution with four samples of full-scene anti aliasing.

This monitor was physically identical in every way to the AOpen F75PS, aside from the Gigabyte badging on the front bezel. Both featured the same solid metal base, sturdy design and nifty sockets for plugs direct on the back, and there’s no prize for guessing that they performed identically in all of the tests we put them through.

This card performed well in 3DMark01SE, producing 14,739 3Dmarks and falling just behind the top performing AOpen in this category. Unfortunately, it fell slightly behind the competition in the 3DMark05 high stress test, and even fell behind two of the three X700Pro cards on test.

A budget case that delivers almost everything you’d want at a great price.

A cool, quiet and capable mini-PC that should agree with your budget.

One of the plainer drives, it lacks a front audio adjustment dial or headphone socket, but does deliver on fast CD writing without too much damage to your wallet.

Where XFX rose early with the DirectX 8 tests and dropped off in the DirectX 9.0 tests, this card did the exact opposite - it jumped up five places to the middle of the pack in 3DMark05.