John Gillooly, Sultan of SFF, strips down to his barebones.
Even newcomers to the small form factor market are now into the second or third generation of products, and this is beginning to show in the build quality and functionality of these barebones' chassis. We looked at Soltek's Qbic SFF PC late last year, and found some deficiencies in design that held it back.
Coming with an Apple-esque white enamel shell and swanky mirrored front, the new generation Soltek EQ3801 MW has an impressive spec list. Based around NVIDIA's nForce3 250GbE chipset, it supports socket 754 Athlon 64 CPUs and comes with NVIDIA's Firewall technology, 250 watt PSU, Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE1394, two SATA channels and eight-channel AC'97 audio.
Like the previous generation, the chassis supports two 5.25in optical drives, with drive covers built into the mirrored front panel. It also has one external and one internal 3.25in drive bay, with a springloaded cover over the external one. Unlike the previous generation, whose construction we found somewhat flimsy, the EQ3801 MW is much more structurally rigid. For cooling, the EQ3801 MW relies on a small fan to suck the air out of a slot at the rear, combined with small grilles on the side panels. It is not as elegant as some cooling solutions, but it works OK under normal conditions (although we were unable to replicate hot summer conditions during testing). There is no integrated video, however, so an AGP card needs installing, which can block one of the side vents quite effectively.
Besides this, it is a decent case to work in, although other manufacturers have much more user friendly products about to hit the market. But Soltek has gone to the effort of tidying up the often terrifying cable tangle inside the box, which makes life much easier when installing hardware.
With the Qbic EQ3801 MW, Soltek has leveraged the nForce3 250 GbE chipset quite well to provide a host of functionality.
This is a competent offering, even if it lacks a lot of the trickery that will appear from other manufacturers over the next month or two. Good, but still a few steps from great.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012