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.

Lots more pictures

Even the screws come with directions

Convenient labeling on the cables makes connecting drives simple.

Labeled cables make installation easy

After installing our hard drive, we were able to route our SATA cable through the internal conduits behind the front faceplate, preserving the distinct lack of cable clutter.

SATA cable routed behind faceplate

You end up with just enough slack to connect power and data to your drives.  Notice the right angled power connector on the right as well as the right angled SATA data cable on the left.  The system is engineered to have everything fit seemingly perfectly.

Tidy hard drive cables with right angled connectors

Where?s all the cable clutter?

Clear and open space allows air flow

From the right side, one can see that there is very little inside this case impeding air flow.  This speaks highly of BIOSTAR?s well engineered design.

Fully installed system still seems spacious

One last thing we noticed during installation was the inclusion of an AGP slot ?lock?.  This is the small white piece of plastic ?wrapped? around the AGP slot in the picture below.  When pushed to the left, this locks the AGP card in place so that it isn?t accidentally loosened during use or transport.

AGP card locked into place

With our test system built, our next task was to install Windows XP.  Since we opted to use a SATA drive, we needed to provide Windows XP with a ?SCSI or RAID? driver so it could find our hard disk.  Unfortunately BIOSTAR hasn?t included a floppy with this driver, which necessitated a quick visit to their website from one of our other systems to download the driver and create a floppy for Windows.  Once we obtained the driver, Windows XP installation went along smoothly.

With the OS installed as well as the full set of drivers from the IDEQ 200P Driver CD, we proceeded to fire up the benchmarking suite.  Unfortunately, despite a flawless Windows XP installation, PC Mark, SiSoft Sandra, and MemTest86 each consistently caused our system to reboot spontaneously.  This happened consistently, despite default ?safe? options in the Bios.  Based on other issues we?ve seen with the Athlon64?s memory controller and Corsair XMS DDR modules, evidence is pointing in the direction of a memory incompatibility.

For now, let?s move on to the Bios?

Bios & Tools

For an SFF motherboard, the IDEQ 200P provides quite a range of overclocking features, similar to what you?d find in many of the full sized nForce 3 motherboard implementations.  Let?s begin with DDR timings.

DDR Memory Timing Options

In addition to capping the maximum DDR clock frequency, the 200P?s Bios lets you adjust more DDR timing options than we?ve ever seen adjustable in an SFF system.  These include the standard options such as CAS Delay, Ras-To-Cas Delay, etc? as well as a few new options such as Refresh Period, Read to Write Delay, etc?   It looks like the possible combinations of tweaking these numbers is nearly endless.

But before you tune your memory timings, you may want to first overclock your CPU which will directly affect your DDR clock frequency.  The 200P?s Bios will let you adjust the CPU clock frequency between 200Mhz and 250Mhz in 1Mhz increments.  AGP overclocking is also available, up to 100Mhz in 1Mhz increments.

CPU and AGP Overclocking

CPU and DDR voltages are also adjustable to make sure you?re getting the most out of your overclocking setup.  CPU voltage can be adjusted in percentages as follows.

CPU Voltage Adjustments

DDR memory voltage can be adjusted between 2.75 and 2.90V.

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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)