As the floodgates open and the market becomes swamped with mini barebones systems we’ve had a huge variety of offerings are piling up in the labs.
As the floodgates open and the market becomes swamped with mini barebones systems we’ve had a huge variety of offerings are piling up in the labs. Biostar is one of the longer serving members of the mini barebones building community and it was only the second manufacturer to launch a model supporting the Athlon 64, in the guise of the IDEQ 200P.
After noticing some fundamental design flaws on other brands of mini barebones we were blown away by how well thought-out the IDEQ 200P was. It was the most ‘cable free’ unit we had seen, with the front IO ports connecting to the front of the motherboard, rather than tangling their way around the AGP card to connect at the rear. The other cables were carefully routed around the chassis, allowing for clean airflow through the unit.
To cope with the heat pumping Athlon 64 CPU, Biostar had employed a hefty copper heat pipe cooler. This had a single fan that pushed air across the heatsink towards a ducted grill at the back of the IDEQ 200P; the only externally mounted fan was the one attached to the power supply unit. Despite this we found no overheating issues.
But the real triumph of the IDEQ 200P was that Biostar swapped the traditional placement of the PCI and AGP slots so that the box could accommodate the chunky heatsink of a GeForce FX 5900 series video card (as long as it’s only dual slot). Unlike other models we had seen, Biostar managed to do this without jamming the card against the drive bay or blocking ATA ports on the hard disk.
While the IDEQ 200P did not have slick display panels or other fancy features, it was a solid, no nonsense desktop PC replacement with sensible use of space and the careful design that only comes from experience in this field. It wasn’t the fanciest mini barebones unit on the market, but it’s one of the best.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012