Biostar IDEQ 210V -- A Review

If what you want in a computer is an easy, bare-bones system, you would do well to check out the Biostar IDEQ 210V. This small form factor PC is a big box-shaped silver cube which is inexpensive and which does a great job of supporting AMD Socket A CPUs. The barebones system comes with a motherboard that includes onboard sound, as well as an 8x AGP slot, video and a PCI slot. For a barebones system, it's a high-quality one with an interior that is beautifully arranged.

The measurements on the Biostar IDEQ 210V are 7.4 by 8.3 by 12.7 inches. While not exactly a cube, it certainly appears to be when compared to other systems. It features nearly everything you'd need for building a system with the exception of DDR333 memory, the CPU, an optical drive and a hard drive.

If there is one weak point of the unit as it ships, it's the video. Featuring a VIA UniChrome 2D - 3D, but any serious gamer will immediately be adding a quicker video card to the unit's 8x AGP slot. Still, one can't argue too much with this shortcoming since the video, which is included, adds almost nothing to the price. After you add the higher-level video card, this will be quite the machine to take to any gamers' LAN party.

The unit is quite light, being made of aluminum. In fact, you'll be hard pressed to find anything with similar features that weighs any less.

The system's interior is quite clean and spacious, making it a breeze to work on, even though the unit is compact. All of the cables can be found pre-routed neatly along the unit's frame. This has the effect of keeping everything exactly where you'd expect and need them to be.

The system features a 200w power supply and a custom-tailored heat-sink. Putting the system together will likely take you about a half hour, so you don't need to worry about spending half the day building it.

biostar ideq 210v

One problem you might encounter is forgetting to set the unit's clock speed jumper. Although it comes with a 100 Mhz default, you'll most likely use a CPU which will want 133 or even better, 166 Mhz. If you do forget, the unit will work, but it won't be very friendly to your more resource-hungry games.

The barebones system has room for a single hard drive, optical drive as well as an extra 3.5 external drive bay. It also supports both ATA 133 and SATA 150 drives. It includes auto-sensing Ethernet on the system back. And available on the case's front are USB 2, S/PDIF and Firewire (IEEE 1394).

After you get the system up and running, it runs remarkably silently. In fact, according to many reports, it's the quietest system they have, with the possible exception of a Mac Mini.

When you take into account the price of this barebones system, it does an excellent job of performing up to your expectations--more so than its bigger, uglier cousins.