Introduction:

Have you heard of BIOSTAR by now?  Don?t worry, I?ll forgive you if the answer is no; but, believe it or not, the new IDEQ 200P is their 5th small form factor barebones system released in the past year.  Today we?ll be taking an in-depth look at the 200P, BIOSTAR?s first foray into Athlon64 / nForce3 based SFF systems.

 

The company itself was founded in 1986 and is located in Taiwan.  Through heavy investment in R&D, they?ve recently made impressive strides into the mainstream motherboard market against heavyweights such as Asus, Abit, and Shuttle.  With their release of the recent IDEQ series of SFF barebones systems, they represent one of the driving forces in small form factor PC innovation.  It?s especially impressive to see an Athlon64 based system available so soon after the official CPU release by AMD, less than a month ago.

BIOSTAR has loaded the IDEQ 200P up with quite a few extras including gigabit LAN, SATA RAID, 6-channel AC ?97 audio, impressive overclocking features, and even optional wireless networking.  We?ll get into more of the specifics shortly.  For now, let?s begin with the overall system specifications:

 

The system comes with the standard accessories including a single SATA cable, SATA power conversion cable, drive bay covers, and the usual assortment of IDE and floppy cables.  Notice in the picture below, the IDE and floppy cables are missing.  They actually come pre-installed in the system, but we?ll talk more about that later.  In the meantime, here?s a look at exactly what you?ll get with the IDEQ 200P.

IDEQ 200P Accessories

So is this the Athlon64 SFF system you?ve been waiting for?  Let?s try to answer that question by first taking a look at the case externals?

External Design

The IDEQ 200P appears very similar to its younger siblings in size, shape, and general external design.  Having reviewed quite a few of the competing small form factor systems, the 200P feels larger than its competitors.  It turns out that the system measures only slightly less than 2.5cm longer than a standard Shuttle XPC, but it does feel noticeably larger.  It turns out though that this slightly larger case design ends up buying you quite a bit in terms of convenience and flexibility on the inside.  We?ll visit that soon.  For now, let?s focus on the externals.

One of the first things you?ll notice when looking at the 200P is the sliding drive bay cover.  This feature, inherited from previous IDEQ case designs, easily hides internal CD/DVD/floppy drives creating a smooth, clean, and generally aesthetically pleasing front faceplate.  The sliding plate covers the external 5.25? and 3.5? drive bays in its upwards position, and covers the power and reset buttons as well as system LEDs in its lower position.  It is not removable (at least it?s not intended to be removed), and is made of plastic with a glossy black finish.

next >

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• External Design, Cont (1 of 5)
• Internal Design (2 of 5)
• Internal Design, Cont (3 of 5)
• Lots more pictures (4 of 5)
• Yet more pictures and conclusion (5 of 5)