Syntax EZ-Clocker I-Series: Small Form Factor System

Company: Syntax
Product: EZ-Clocker I-Series
Street Price: ~$230 USD
Date Reviewed: February 20, 2004
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel

Inside The EZ-Clocker Chassis:

Fortunately all the major connections inside the EZ-Clocker are done at the factory, so all that is needed are the last few components to get the system up and running. A lot of the cables have been tied down and placed out of the way to maximize what little space is left inside the chassis.

First thing to be installed would be the CPU, which is cooled via a heat-pipe setup. The fan/shroud needs to be removed in order to remove the heatsink. By using heat-pipes, the heat generated by the CPU is transferred directly to the cooling fins within the exhaust fan shroud; this helps keep case overall temperatures down.

Next to be installed would be the memory, which the motherboard has two DIMM slots to allow for a Dual-Channel memory setup. After installing the memory, an AGP and/or PCI card can be installed. Longer AGP video cards will be a tight squeeze, however we fit a Radeon 9700 Pro with no problems. The AGP slot supports 8x/4x AGP video cards.

The hard drive mounts vertically from the top of the chassis, and the CD-ROM / DVD drive mounts on the side. Power to these drives is supplied via a single power cable with two connectors on it. Also the IDE cables are just the perfect length to connect to each of these devices.