BIOSTAR - BIOSTAR IDEQ 200P Review

MS reviews BIOSTAR’s nForce3-150 powered miniPC, the iDEQ 200P:

Inside, we have a wealth of features all centered around the Athlon64 and, in this case the nVidia nForce3-150 or Crush K8 chipset. Whatever is missing from the repertoire of features supported directly by the chipset is made up for by 3rd party ICs as, for example, VIA’s VT6420 SATA controller and VT6307 IEEE1394 physical layer as well as the Realtek brand AC97 and Gigabit LAN controller ICs.

With this wealth of features and the raw power of a 64-bit processor under the hood, what else could go wrong? Details, you named it, and there are quite a few that need some further attention. We took the power drill and the soldering iron … and then, we decided not to void the warranty and only give a verbal description of our suggested mods.

. . . Bottom line is that there is some additional work necessary on both the software and the hardware level. The necessary case and interfacing mods can be done without much of a problem by any DYI system builder, for the rest, it is back into the Biostar ballpark. We are confident, though that the problems are going to be solved - one way or another.