Rolls Royce. Concorde.  Triumph motorcycles.  Apple iMac. Morgan Sports Car.  PowerMac G5.  The Mini.  Dyson vacuum cleaner.  Aston Martin.  Names you wouldn’t normally expect to associate with a review of a small form factor PC.  Yet they all have one thing in common - they’re British designed products that brought class-leading design and beauty to their field - and often charged a premium price for the pleasure.  Performance was not always the best, but the product was always an object of desire and a product that made a statement about its owner.  Products designed to turn heads and demand attention. 

Today we are going to look at another company that shares this design philosophy and has a range of premium-priced small form factor (SFF) machines that bring stunning looks and design to a field that has so far been largely dominated by aluminum boxes and spray painted plastic.  We’re pleased to introduce Hoojum - the manufacturer of the Cubit 3 and Cubit P4 small form factor machines.  In this two-part review we’ll take a look at Hoojum’s VIA EPIA M10000 based machine - the Cubit 3 - and bring you the web’s first look at their premium machine - the Cubit P4 (based on Shuttle’s FB61 Intel i865G/ICH5 motherboard).

It’s clear from the outset that Hoojum is targeting a quite different market than the Shuttles and Biostars of the industry.  As a small company operating from a workshop in rural England, it would make little sense for Hoojum to take on the giants of the SFF industry directly.  Instead, Hoojum is aiming to build a premium product for those for whom individual style, limited-edition design and a handcrafted finish are everything.  These are luxury products - the Bang & Olufsens of the SFF world - and they come with a price-tag to match.

If you’re simply looking to maximize your price/performance ratio and increase your frags at your next LAN-party for the minimum cost, look elsewhere.  If you’re prepared to pay extra for a machine guaranteed to turn heads and demand attention, however, read on.  Hoojum have just the answer for the SFF owner who has everything...

Cubit 3 Benchmarks

Cubit 3 Benchmarks

It is clear that the VIA EPIA-M10000 motherboard has not been designed to compete with the latest and greatest AMD and Intel processors in general purpose computing roles.  It is aimed at providing state-of-the-art multimedia performance in a compact, cool and quiet box, together with "acceptable" x86 compatibility to support mainstream computing applications such as email, office applications and web browsing under Microsoft Windows or Linux.  With that caveat in mind, precisely how well does the Cubit 3 perform?

For the purposes of this review, the standard SiSoftware Sandra 2004 benchmark was used.  This is an artificial benchmark, but is reasonable well respected and gives a good indication of relative performance.

We start with a look at the performance of the processor itself.  The CPU Arithmetic benchmark indicates that the C3 "Nehemiah" processor is roughly comparable to an Intel Pentium III 500MHz or Intel Celeron 600MHz processor.  Note, however, that the floating point unit (FPU) is significantly slower than on either of these processors.  The benchmark is based on the well-known Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks which are used to assess integer and floating point arithmetic respectively.

The CPU multimedia benchmark is based on the generation of a Mandelbrot fractal image and is designed to stress the multimedia instruction sets (MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2) within the processor.  Again we see that the C3's performance in this artificial benchmark is comparable to that of the Intel Pentium III 500MHz.  Of course, it is worth emphasizing that for the specific role of DVD playback, the C3 processor is able to work in conjunction with the hardware MPEG2 decoder in the northbridge, and achieve a performance close to that of a Pentium 4.  This is obviously a special case and is not tested in the Sandra benchmark.

The Sandra memory benchmark is based on the well known STREAM benchmark, and is designed to measure the rate at which data can flow between the memory and processor (the "bandwidth").  Despite using PC2100 memory at 266MHz DDR, the EPIA-M10000 struggles to match the bandwidth performance of the older PC100 or PC133 systems of two or three years ago.  The principal reason for this relatively poor memory performance is the bottleneck resulting from the 133MHz FSB of the C3 processor.  Whilst the memory can be accessed at 266MHz, the processor can only accept the results at 133MHz.

The cache and memory benchmark illustrates the combined performance of the cache and memory systems in the processor.  The C3 processor has 64kB of L2 cache and is seen to have a reasonably competitive performance, surpassing all but the AMD Duron up to test blocks of 64kB - at which point the data must overflow into mainboard memory.  On the Pentium III results you can clearly see the higher speed of the 16kB L1 cache, and the slower 128kB cache.

The Cubit 3 was supplied with a 60GB Maxtor 7200prm ATA/100 disk, and it is clear that the disk performance is exactly what would be expected of such a disk.  The EPIA M10000 therefore provides normal disk performance - which is important to know if you are considering using the machine in a personal video recorder (PVR) application.

In summary then, it is clear that the Cubit 3 has the overall computational performance of a state-of-the-art machine from three or so years ago.  Its number crunching performance is comparable with a Pentium III 500MHz or Intel Celeron 600MHz using PC100 memory. 

However, it would be wrong to equate the EPIA M10000 with a three year old machine.  It offers the disk I/O performance of the latest machines, plus support for the full range of modern I/O standards like IEEE1394 and USB 2.0.  It also offers integrated 10/100 MB/s LAN and integrated 5.1 audio.  Furthermore, for the specific application of DVD playback, it offers performance comparable to a 2.0GHz processor, thanks to the hardware decoder in the northbridge.  It is also considerably smaller, cooler, quieter and cheaper than the systems of yesteryear.  What is clear is that the EPIA M10000 is a niche product designed with very specific markets in mind - namely cool, silent and compact home multimedia applications and general purpose networked computing.

< previous - (5 of 14) - next >

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• Hoojum - the history (1 of 14)
• Cubit 3 - small and beautiful (2 of 14)
• VIA EPIA M10000 and C3 Processor (3 of 14)
• Cubit 3 Onboard Audio (4 of 14)
• Cubit 3 Benchmarks (5 of 14)
• Cubit 3 Specifications and Cost (6 of 14)
• Cubit 3 Kit (7 of 14)
• Cubit 3 Conclusions (8 of 14)
• Cubit P4 - powerful reflections (9 of 14)
• Cubit P4 - Internals (10 of 14)
• Cubit P4 Cooling (11 of 14)
• Cubit P4 Benchmarks (12 of 14)
• Cubit P4 Specifications and Cost (13 of 14)
• Cubit P4 Conclusions (14 of 14)