X-bit labs

EZ Watcher 3060 Barebone System: “Center of Your Digital Universe”

Category: Mobile

by Svyatoslav Soloviev

[ 10/28/2003 | 03:35 PM ]

Wow, this is cool! Now a small form-factor PC also offers overclocking friendly options. And this has nothing to do with traditional overclocking techniques. EZ Watcher 3060 features a special wheel, which allows adjusting the CPU speed by simply rotating it! Moreover, this is just a great product overall.

Table of contents:

• Specifications
  
• Closer Look
  
• Assembly
  
• EZ Watcher 3060 in Action: Performance Benchmarks
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Performance in Real Applications
  
• Cooling Solution Efficiency
  
• Conclusion
  

Intel’s “center of the digital universe” talk about its own processors is essentially true. We have any kind of information – music, movies, and books – in the digital form nowadays. To live in this digital universe, we need a computer with a speedy processor.

With the time, however, the computers grew strong enough to make this universe rolling even without the topmost processor, the biggest memory amount, and the fastest graphics card. Many users today don’t want an ultra-fast system, roaring as hell and costing a nice sum of money, because they can get a small, relatively inexpensive and quite noiseless device for performing simple office tasks, for watching movies and for playing games, instead. These machines have even acquired a generic name, “Small Form-Factor PC” or “barebone”.

We have already posted several reviews of such barebone systems (you can find them in our Mobile section). Let us now introduce to you another one – the stylish EZ Watcher 3060 from PC CHIPS.

Specifications

The case of the EZW-3060 has many traces of what is usually called creative design, and what we don’t often see in system cases of ordinary PCs. The silver-colored case and the black-lacquered front panel with an informational LCD-display are a treat by themselves, but there is also that wheel, which controls the processor clock-rate “on the fly”! The compact size of the computer allows it to fit well into the definition of a barebone: the height of the system case doesn’t even reach 30cm.

The cooling solution is very thoroughly designed. The system is equipped with a noiseless 70mm fan that blows the hot air off the CPU and the graphics card. The power-supply unit is taken out of the case altogether. I should admit that PC CHIPS engineering team did a really good job: the EZW-3060 system has no temperature-related problems whatsoever.