I'm an XBOX nut and was given the opportunity by Gamestron.com to review their enhanced XBOX FT-X2. I personally own two Xbox's, one is a standard non-modded, and the other is a Modded Xbox sporting a 120 Gig and the Xecuter2 Bios. The FT-X2 has several advantages over your standard modded Xbox. First off it comes with a 1.4ghz Pentium 3 Celeron Cpu, and a hot jumper which allows you to change the FSB while the system is running. This allows you to clock down to 700mhz, this might be necessary for games that might run too fast under the 1.4ghz setting. It also comes equipped with an external bios chip. The advantage of having this external chip is that it allows you to have multiple bios chips and interchange them. It basically gives you more options when it comes to the amount of software you can use on your Xbox.
     Now lets get down to playability, the first game a tried was Kong Fu Chaos. This is an awesome four player Kong fu fighting game. I tried it on the FT-X2 at the 1.4ghz setting and the game ran over 30% faster, which is cool for this game because the action gets intense and overwhelming at times. If playing faster games is not your thing than lets get to the real advantages of having an enhanced FT-X2 Modded Xbox. Now let's get one thing out of the way first. I do not condone the illegal use of an Xbox bios. I also need to inform you that if you wish to play game ROMs off of the emulation software for arcade games you must own the actual PCB boards. Okay enough legal stuff.
     The real advantage to having the enhanced Xbox is the extra CPU power. I use Mame-X which is the Xbox port of the popular PC arcade emulator. Follow this link if you have no idea what I'm talking about ( http://www.mame.net/ ). Well one problem with mame-x is that it uses a lot of the CPU's resources in order to emulate the arcade games. The standard Xbox only has a 700mhz Intel cpu with a 128 cache. Well when I try to play my favorite high-end arcade games like, Ultimate Mortal Combat I run into performance issues. Now the enhanced FT-X2 has the 1.4 ghz Intel with 256L2 cache, the extra processing power allowed me to play the games that demanded more cpu resources, it eliminated game lag. It also proved helpful when I played my Nintendo 64 games on it. Mario Kart on the normal Xbox would barely run but with the new enhanced Xbox we saw a 43% performance increase. This pre-modded enhanced system gets my approval as a viable gaming system. Why bother modding you own Xbox and voiding your warranty, or worst yet burning up you machine. Gamestron.com offers 90 day warranty with all of their systems. Not to mention the cool skins you can pick. They also gave me a little preview of what's to come. They told me they have a 128mb ram, 1.2 Pentium Xbox system coming out soon. Well, I can't wait for it because it will open even more possibilities for my Xbox.