The BIOS
The SN95G5's hardware looks pretty good, but can the cube's BIOS hold up its end of the bargain?

Yes, and then some. While the BIOS's memory tweaking options aren't as expansive as some of the Socket 939 ATX boards we've reviewed recently, the most common timings are there.

Users can take the cube's system bus up to 280MHz with a locked AGP/PCI bus. The BIOS also yields HyperTransport and processor multipliers, although the processor multipliers are only available in 1x rather than 0.5x steps.

To keep juice flowing to overclocked components, the BIOS serves up plenty of voltage tweaking options. CPU voltages top out at 1.7V, but for a little cube like the SN95G5, extreme overclocking probably isn't in the cards.

Perhaps the BIOS's most useful options are its fan speed controls. Users can dictate the behavior of the cube's system/processor and power supply fans, making them ramp linearly with temperature increases or oscillate between two fan speed levels.

One may also define the temperature threshold for linear fan speed ramping, which is how I'd recommend the cube be configured. However, the BIOS doesn't provide fan failure or temperature-based shutdown or alarm conditions. For a cube that depends largely on one cooling fan, a little protection would be good for peace of mind.

In addition to providing a host of BIOS tweaking options, the SN95G5 is also compatible with NVIDIA's Windows-based system utility software.

The system utility lets users monitor system variables, manipulate memory and AGP bus speeds, and tweak select memory timings from within Windows. Control over the HyperTransport and processor multipliers is missing, so most overclocking will still have to be done from within the BIOS.