BIOSTAR - BIOSTAR iDEQ 200P Athlon64 SFF System Review

Bjorn3D takes a look at the nForce3 150 based BIOSTAR iDEQ 200P:

You definitely do get a lot in a little package with the iDEQ 200P. There’s SATA RAID, 6-channel audio, gigabit ethernet, and I/O ports galore! That’s impressive and probably appealing to a lot of people. A system like this would have been great for me a few years a go in college. It would not seem like a crazy idea to bring your PC home for the weekend or take it anywhere (can you say LAN party?) with you since it’s so small. Biostar even offeres a special bag to transport iDEQ systems!

..If it weren’t for the few nagging issues I experienced with this system, I would be praising it without reservation. Unfortunately, those nagging issues were big enough that they cannot be ignored. The single completion of a synthetic memory benchmark is disturbing, and I still do not know what to think about it. What is really puzzling is that I did not experience any other negative issues with stability. The system was rock solid during an hour of UT2K3 deathmatching. Another issue that bothers me is that the System Control Utility seems to act very flaky, and it uses more CPU time than such a utility should. Even the nice features in the System Control Utility have serious issues. For example, you can manually set the speeds of the CPU and system fans; however, you cannot save these settings so that they are used at each boot-up. Other than these issues, the iDEQ 200P’s performance was on par with its peers. It even trumped the other systems in some benchmarks. Without the System Utility running, I think it would have a solid chance at being in the lead in nearly all the benchmarks I ran.

Biostar iDEQ 200P Athlon64 SFF System @ Bjorn3D