Biostar iDEQ 200T - More Design, BIOS and Test Systems
Published on 2004-02-18 23:36:20 By: Hooz

To be completely honest, I didn't even bother to look to see if the PSU fan sucks air into the case or blows it out. It didn't seem to matter much though because the iDEQ 200T consistently maintained 5-6 degree (C) lower temperatures than my SB62G2 with the same hardware inside and under the same loads.

Instead of a one piece cover Biostar opted for a three panel cover for the iDEQ 200T. All panels are secured by thumb screws, so getting them off and on is as simple as it gets. This is also nice because the layout of the machine is such that all the parts that you would regularly need to access (video card and memory) are right next to one side panel or the other. If you need to swap your CPU it'll be a bit more work, but the removable drive tray makes that pretty simple too.

This brings me to my final design observation for the iDEQ 200T... The absolute lack of cable clutter! Biostar takes all the origami out of SFF PC building by pre-routing all of the cables for you and turning the hard drive bay sideways. Everything is cut to length, "rounded" and routed through the structure of the case for you before you even take it out of the box. Even a fully assembled machine is easy to get inside, and I can honestly say that it was the neatest interior of any SFF box I've ever built.

The BIOS

I'm not going to dwell on the BIOS for long because, well, it's a BIOS. All of the standard options are in there as well as some the normal overclocker's settings for Vcore, DIMM Voltage and FSB speed.

As with the Shuttle boxes we've looked at in the past, the iDEQ has fan speed settings in the BIOS' "PC Health Status" area. You can decide if you'd like your fans to run fast, or slow, or if you'd like to let the motherboard control that for you. I set both fans to the "SMART" setting and never looked back. Without my (louder than hell) Radeon 9700Pro in the box, the fan noise was barely audible from as close as 2 feet from my head. You've got to love silent and reliable computers, especially if you have a room full of them like I do.

Test Systems

For this benchmarking session I kept the two machines as close to identical as I could get. Hyper-threading was enabled on both machines for all tests. Here's the skinny on what was in the boxes:

	Biostar iDEQ 200T	Shuttle SB62G2
CPU	P4 2.4C	P4 2.4C
Chipset	Intel i865G	Intel i865G
Memory	Crucial 512mb (x2) PC3200 DDR	Crucial 512mb (x2) PC3200 DDR
Video	Tyan Tachyon 9700 Pro	Tyan Tachyon 9700 Pro
Storage	WD800JB	WD800JB
OS	WinXP Pro w/SP1	WinXP Pro w/SP1

For the benchmarking applications I went with our regular suite. The breakdown goes like this: