They say that imitation is the ultimate form of flattery. In that case AOpen must be the ultimate flatterer. As soon as MacMini launched, AOpen came out with their minPC version.
Then they came up with their own version of Shuttle XPC - small form factor AOpen XC Cube barebone system.
And today XC Cube got Santa Rosa upgrade with AOpen XC Cube EZ/EU965 system, that has:
- Intel Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo and Pentium D support
- built-in Intel G965 Express chipset
- up to 4Gb of 800/667/533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
- support for nVIDIA 8800GTX and ATI X1950XTX Graphics cards
- support for 3 S-ATA2 HDDs
Overall AOpen XC Cube EZ/EU965 barebone system should look pretty attractive to various niche PC vendors and we should start seeing finished, XC Cube based desktop PCs pretty soon.