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The Applications
Well, the DeskView application is useful if you want to find out information about your system. However, since I only have one system and not a network of them, it's not as useful for me. It has a feature called DeskOff where I can actually schedule a reboot, standby, or shutdown of the system if I wanted to. This could be useful if you want to put your system on standby at night without having to worry about doing it yourself. The SystemGuard application is similar to that of Motherboard Monitor. It displays your system temps, fan speeds, and voltage settings. You can use the watchdog feature to monitor various system components and set alarms for them. The nice thing I like about SystemGuard is the graphical indicators that show if the CPU temp is nearing a dangerous level. Below is a shot of the temperature panel. The fans and voltage have a similar panel. SystemGuard stays in your taskbar and displays the status of your machine at all times.
Performance
Well what's a system review without your standard benchmarks? Here I use SiSoft Sandra to do the performance testing. The system is very stable at stock speed and I've been running it now for a week or so without rebooting with Prime95 running in the background.
As you can see the CPU benchmark scores are pretty much up to par with what they should be. However, the Memory score is another story. The performance isn't what I would have expected and there is nothing I can really do to tweak the memory settings. The BIOS has nothing in terms of changing memory timings etc. so I'm pretty much out of luck. This keeps from running your memory out of spec. I think the problem is because I am using CAS 3 memory so the system defaults to that if your system memory is not specifically CAS2. The results would probably be better if I used CAS2. After using the system for a few days I found it to be pretty responsive. The lower memory bench doesn't really translate much to the real world unless you're doing some really extensive memory access. For every day stuff like word processing, surfing the web, listening to music and stuff like that it doesn't make much difference. Having CAS2 memory in there wouldn't hurt though.
>> Is It Really Quiet?/Does It Cool?
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