Verdict: BIOSTAR FLIPS ITS LID
Lime and salt may make great accompaniments to a shot of Tequila, but lime green isn't such a popular choice of colour for a PC. Unless your tastes tend towards the futuristic, bright green is not going to match your domestic decor. There's also an iridescent theme to Biostar's latest iDEQ small form factor bare bones, the 300G. The Perspex fascia is tinged with emerald light and sports green motifs. It's eye-catching, but it's far from the most significant thing about this SFF.
In the past, we've been impressed with Biostar's solidly engineered products. The Athlon 64 iDEQ 200P (see Issue 10, p78) resided on our Elite list for many months. With the 300G, though, Biostar has taken chassis design to a new level. Nicknamed 'jaws', the case unfastens at the front without any screws being involved. Hinges allow it to fold up in the middle, and it locks into position when it reaches a 90-degree angle. The hinged portion takes the front fascia and drive bays with it, leaving the processor and two DIMM sockets in plain view.
The 300G's CPU cooling is another major innovation. Based on the BTX specification, it channels air from the front to the back of the case using vented ducting. The air passes over the Northbridge and Southbridge as well as the processor. The CPU is cooled by a heatsink. An 80mm fan at the front of the case sucks in air from vents in the fascia, while another fan guides it out the rear. Both fans are temperature controlled, and we found the noise levels to be quite acceptable. A Windows utility calibrates fan speeds to keep them to the minimum.
Despite the innovative cooling, it's good to see that Biostar has stuck with the same heatsink fastening arm found in its other iDEQs, which makes fitting it a rapid and entirely tool-free operation. However, apart from the PSU fan, the 300G doesn't have any other fans for cooling the other components. The slats in the ducting will draw some air through, but components such as the hard disks have less ventilation than in other SFF cases.
Processor cooling is particularly important for the 300G, though, because it's intended for LGA775 Pentium 4e CPUs. Using the 915G chipset, it has PCI-E support in the form of a single 16x slot. But as is the case with many 915G SFFs and motherboards, Biostar has chosen to stick with mainstream DDR memory, rather than move up to DDR2. A PCI and mini-PCI slot are also included. The hinged portion of the chassis incorporates a 5.25in drive bay and two 3.5in internal bays, which have S-ATA cables routed ready for use. Although only one Molex power plug is available, a Y-splitter is included in the box for two Molex or S-ATA power connections. With the on-board ICH6R Southbridge, RAID is an option as well.
One thing you will be hard pressed to install is an EIDE hard drive. The motherboard provides just one EIDE channel, and the cable is already attached and routed to the 5.25in drive bay and a riser card. This strange card is home to the LAN port and two DC power jacks - 5V and 12V. The intended purpose of these is made clear by a Y-cable, which brings the two power jacks together into a single S-ATA power plug. There's a S-ATA data socket on the back of the 300G as well, making it possible to attach an external hard disk. But this uses S-ATA rather than S-ATA 2, so the cabling is very flimsy.
The PSU produces sufficient wattage for most configurations, although we wouldn't recommend trying to install a GeForce 6800 Ultra. The PSU offers a nominal 250W, split into 16A over the 12V rail, 18A over 5V, and 18A over 3.3V. However, the combined power of the latter two rails is 115W, so you won't be able to use the full 18A on both.
Although the 300G has a number of features for the LAN party enthusiast, such as the 16x PCI-E slot, in most respects it's aimed at PVR usage. There's a built-in IR receiver, and a remote control is included in the box. This allows you to use the 300G for listening to the radio, audio CDs and MP3s, or for watching VCDs and DVDs without booting into Windows. Audio volume and DVD menu navigation controls are found on the fascia underneath the fluorescent display, which shows useful information such as temperature and fan speeds in Windows, and track information when a CD or DVD is playing.
There's also a media card reader on the front, and the all-important reset button that some SFFs mysteriously fail to include.
PERFORMANCE
In order to put the 300G through its paces, we installed our usual 3.2GHz Pentium 4e and 1GB of Corsair XMS 4400C25. We also tried a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 EE, but the system wouldn't even boot. It's worrying to see a brand-new system incapable of supporting Pentium 4 EE, even though you'd be unlikely to choose such an expensive CPU for a PVR. Although the 300G incorporates the Intel GMA 900 GPU, we added a GeForce 6800 GT PCI-E graphics card. The PSU seemed to hold up under this load, but connecting it all was tricky. There's no Molex plug routed specifically to the PCI-E slot at all, so we had to attach two splitter cables to power up the graphics card. This is yet another indication that the 300G isn't intended for LAN gamers.
At standard clocks, the 300G didn't perform quite as well as expected. Compared with Shuttle's similarly specified SB86i (see Issue 18, p36), the Media Benchmark scores were somewhat pedestrian, although Doom 3 ran as well as expected. Don't expect to be able to squeeze any more out of it by overclocking either. Although you can tweak the SDRAM timings, and even run the memory at 533MHz instead of 400MHz, we found that this didn't actually change the memory speed. Our Corsair XMS 4400C25 should be able to operate at 550MHz, but without the ability to increase memory voltage, the system wouldn't POST. It also lacks a CPU voltage control and PCI-E lock, so while the FSB can be tweaked up to 255MHz, we could only get the system to benchmark with an FSB of 215MHz, resulting in a CPU clock of 3.44GHz. This only improved the frame rate in Doom 3 by a couple of frames per second, and actually worsened the Media Benchmark scores, suggesting that the thermal throttling in the Pentium 4e had kicked in. There's a Windows Warpspeeder overclocking utility included as well, but it wouldn't even load.
CONCLUSION
Its poor overclocking potential means the 300G is far more suited for use as a PVR than a LAN party box. So the innovative 'jaws' system would seem somewhat superfluous. It does make building a system a quick process, but you're unlikely to keep swapping components in a PVR anyway. Its lime-green looks are also a matter of taste, and most of us at CPC didn't like it. As the lime motif would imply, the Biostar iDEQ 300G MCE-I isn't a lemon, but you can find sweeter fruit elsewhere.
