Biostar's Nforce 4 AMD 64 system is a little winner

BIOSTAR'S NEWEST small form factor PC, the iDEQ 330P, has much in common with the company's iDEQ 300G (released a few months ago and reviewed by the Inquirer here in its Media Centre version. It has the same clever hinged case design, for easy assembly, and the same BTX-style internal layout, for efficient, quiet cooling. Please refer to that earlier INQ article for more information about those impressive features - which appear to be unchanged in the 330P.

Despite the internal similarities, the 330P looks very different from Biostar's other 300-series iDEQ units, with a subdued black exterior and subtle front panel styling - and without the mirror finish, decorative LED lighting, or built-in FM radio of its stablemate the 300G.

Of course, from a technical point of view, the key difference between the two systems is the CPU. The 330P is an AMD Athlon 64 system and is based around the Nvidia Nforce 4 chipset, while the 300G is an Intel system. A Biostar representative told me that one of the reasons behind the differences in external design is that AMD platform users are, in general, more concerned about performance than Intel-ites and, by implication, less concerned about what is popularly referred to as 'bling bling'. By the way, if you're looking for the Biostar iDEQ 300P, as shown at CeBIT, this is it - Biostar changed the model number to emphasize that this is from a newer generation of products than the 300G.

Full specifications are on Biostar's website here. To summarise some key points, this system has one PCI slot, one PCIe 16x, two DDR RAM sockets, two IDE sockets, 2 S-ATA connectors, two 3.5 inch hard drive bays, one optical drive bay, and front panel slots for all the popular memory card formats. There's also a mini-PCI slot on the reverse side of the PC's K8NBD-S9 motherboard - suitable for a wireless card. And finally, an IRDA infra-red receiver on the front panel. I tried to get this to work with a Windows MCE-compatible remote control, but wasn't successful, perhaps a driver is needed. A 300W power supply keeps everything running smoothly.

With its two thermally-controlled fans, the 330P is a very quiet system, despite the power it offers. This is another impressive display for Biostar's pseudo-BTX system layout, with the fans pulling air in a straight line through the system.

Biostar provides a Windows utility, System Control, to control the CPU and system fan speed. However, Windows Task Manager reported that this was eating up a surprisingly large amount of CPU time, so I wouldn't recommend using it. Even without System Control running, the BIOS still has basic fan speed control functions which work pretty well to keep the fans quiet and the system cool at all times. A utility like Almico's SpeedFan might also be useful if you want more precise control of fan speed.

At idle or under light loads, with the fan speed reduced low enough to be almost inaudible, the CPU temperature stayed around 45 C. Under heavy load, with the fans running faster and quite a bit noisier, the CPU temperature peaked around 53 C. This test was conducted at an ambient temperature of approximately 25 C, with SpeedFan used to control the fan speed.

I tested the system with Windows XP, Knoppix Linux, and the 64-bit edition of Windows XP, all seemed to work fine. For 64-bit Windows, I did need to download appropriate 64-bit drivers, as none were included with the test system - I would expect that Biostar will add these to the installation disk when the 64-bit edition of Windows is formally released. I tried out ATI X700 and Nvidia 6600-based graphics cards, again, no problems.

The only oddity I noticed was while using the BIOS setup. Occasionally, the system would become extremely slow - slow enough to see it redrawing the BIOS screens character by character. This would persist for several seconds before things returned to normal. It's difficult to explain this (it isn't apparently AMD's cool 'n' quiet clock frequency/voltage control, which didn't even seem to be enabled on my test system), but anyway it was only a mild inconvenience, and I saw no problem of this sort when using Windows or at any other time.

It's obvious that a lot of thought and attention to detail has gone into the chassis design of Biostar's 300-series machines (the 300G, 330G, 330P and 350G). With features like pre-routed cables, and easy motherboard accessibility. These systems really are designed to be very easy to assemble and easy to maintain. Again, refer to the Inquirer's earlier review of the iDEQ 300G for more details on these features.

The 330P is only just moving onto the market now - so might be hard to find in some areas - the few online retailers that quote prices are asking about $500 for the system in barebones form. µ