Biostar iDEQ 300G a small box of tricks

THERE WAS A TIME when a small form factor PC simply had to be small. That's no longer enough. At least ten companies are now making SFF PCs (notable among them: Shuttle, Aopen, iWill, Biostar, FIC, ECS, Epox, and MSI), and the competition is fierce. Biostar's latest, the iDEQ (pronounced 'eye deck') 300G MCE-I, shows how SFF PC manufacturers are adapting to this increasingly competitive market - and it's also one of a new breed of home entertainment hubs built for Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition.

The 300G is designed around Intel's 915G graphics chipset, and supports LGA775 socket CPUs. Biostar's first opportunity to get a step ahead of the competition is the case construction. Obvious effort has gone into the front panel design, with a mirrored finish, perspex surround and green trim (other colours have been sighted). As well as the normal buttons and sockets, the front panel features controls for the built-in FM radio, and the Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) that's common in Windows Media Center Edition PCs.

The company claims that the CPU, memory and disk drives can be installed in a couple of minutes. Actually, I would say five minutes is closer to the truth (if you're familiar with the machine), and at least fifteen minutes for the inexperienced - but that's still extremely fast. The secret is the way the entire top of the PC hinges up from a point about 10cm from the back, bringing the front panel and the drive cages with it, and providing very easy access to the motherboard. Biostar's hyperbole department have dubbed this arrangement 'Jaws'. Actually, that's rather appropriate, because you'll initially be a little nervous about putting your hands inside. A very secure, though simple, locking mechanism prevents it falling closed unexpectedly. Biostar have also greatly improved the LGA775 heatsink retention mechanism. A single, idiot-proof clip holds the heatpipe-equipped CPU heatsink down.

Two fans, one at the front and one at the back, move air through the system's hot components and pump it out the back. Both are temperature controlled, and I found the noise level quite acceptable. There's no fan in the 250 Watt power supply. The 300G has a mini-PCI slot for an optional 802.11g wireless daughtercard. One useful feature I haven't seen before are power and data sockets that let you connect an additional, external SATA hard drive into the back of the PC - note that you can even use an internal SATA drive if you like.

Other important points, briefly: 1 PCI express x16 slot, 1 PCI slot, two SATA hard drive cages, optical drive behind an automatic front panel door, two DDR sockets, and just about every kind of port and card slot you could need on the back and front panels - see Biostar's website for full specifications, here.

All cables are pre-installed and routed wherever they're needed. That's sensible, because most of the sockets are under the power supply and quite hard to reach. Indeed, the hardware design shows great attention to detail throughout. For example, tiny hinged doors above the PCI and other cards make sure you have enough wiggle room to remove and insert them very easily (Shuttle has used a similar arrangement in the past).

IDE support is limited: this PC is designed for S-ATA hard drives. You could install a single IDE hard drive, sharing a cable with the optical drive, but you would need to supply the cable yourself.

As is typical with PC hardware from companies that actually do their own manufacturing, there are some rough edges in the documentation and the supplied software. For example, the front panel display and remote control stopped working (possibly because of an incompatible driver update from Microsoft's Windows Update service) - I was forced to use system restore to fix this. Windows setup also assigned drive letters to the various card reader slots before it got to the disk drives. I'm not sure if Biostar is to blame for this (and it isn't likely to cause problems), but for inexperienced users, it may be disconcerting to have drive H: as the system hard drive.

Inexperienced users will also have trouble with the 300G's attractively-designed, but poorly-written, user and installation manuals. Apart from numerous typos, these appear to have several confusing errors. For example, the User's Manual lists the Award BIOS beep codes, but I listened in vain for these, because both the units I saw didn't appear to have an internal speaker. There are a few points which aren't clearly covered by the manual or by labels on the PC. For example, the two side panels are almost, but not quite, identical, and it is possible to force them on the wrong way around. The documentation problems are mostly with the text, however. The diagrams are good, and the photos are also very useful, though sometimes a bit small.

I tried the 300G out with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. The front panel display and the infra-red remote control worked as they should. I didn't test any of the TV tuner functions, as I don't have a suitable TV tuner card. Although the PC has a built-in FM radio, it isn't integrated into Windows, and I was disappointed to see that the front panel display doesn't display music track names, only numbers - again this seems to be a flaw in Windows MCE, not in Biostar's product.

The built-in FM radio isn't controllable from the remote control or Windows. The radio output is routed through the PC's audio system, so you can even use the PC to record it, but you'll have to use the buttons on the front panel to change channels. The radio also works when the system is plugged in, but not powered up. This is the only 'instant on' feature - all the other media functions require Windows.

Although Biostar have done a very good job controlling noise from the built in fans, they can't do anything about noise from your choice of graphics card and disk drives. I tested the unit out with drives from Asus's QuieTrack series (which are definitely the quietest optical drives I've heard), but all the same, the CD or DVD spinning at top speed was still the noisiest component in the system.

I wanted to pair the 300G with a totally silent graphics card, the GeCube RX700Pro SilenCool. Unfortunately, it wouldn't fit. Only some work on the PC's frame with a hacksaw would have made room for the prodigious heatpipes which loop over the top of the GeCube card. The Albatron PC6600U, another quiet, though not silent, heatpipe-cooled card, did fit, but only when bent at an alarming five degree angle. To summarise: there's no extra space above the 300G's PCI express slot for cards which are taller than normal. In addition, any unusually wide cards are guaranteed to block the PCI slot. Obviously, using any SFF PC as a media center will need careful planning, because of these space constraints and the very limited number of expansion slots.

Buying a SFF PC with the intention of overclocking is unwise, and the 300G's BIOS only provides control of memory timing and front side bus speed. The system I tested, with a 3.4 GHz CPU and one 512 MB DDR400 memory module, handled a ten percent FSB overclock without difficulty. The iDEQ 300G should retail for around $500. µ