BIOSTAR iDEQ 200P which is based on the NF3 150 has very impressive results considering that it is a small form factor box. It also breaks away the myth that such boxes are tuned slower because of the possible heat issues within the box. In our test, we find that this is not the case. In fact, the CPU remains at a reasonable temperature averaging around 44 Deg Celsius after running loops of 3DMark or other stress tests.

The good performance especially in the 3D benchmark tests could be attributed to better drivers from nVIDIA. Again, we find that nVIDIA chipset still hasn't improved its IDE performance. This results in slower disk access thereby slowing down the system esp on content creation and multimedia programs which needs lots of disk thrashing. One thing that we find interesting is that this box allows up to 3 HDD to be installed. This is good for those who need to do SATA RAID 0/1.

Installation is quite straightforward as the connectors are all laid out and labelled clearly. Even the person has no PC building skills, I bet he should be able to do it within half an hour. The features are excellent. Most importantly, this box is very quiet. I can only hear the noise coming from my graphics card.

Overclocking wise, we managed to pull it up to 218MHz FSB at CAS 2.5, 6-3-3. It is quite stable at that FSB. As we are unable to increase the voltage levels, we tried another thing, that is to run the CPU:MEM at 200:166, the max we can go is still 218MHz. Anything higher than that, the system won't boot and the watchdog will come into play and reset it back to 200 for you to boot and ask you to check yoru CMOS settings. In fact, overclocking depends on a bit of luck. Some people are able to overclock to 225 on some boards. Your choice of CPU might affect overclockability more than the board.

Suggested Retail : NA

Pricing Information of other iDEQ 200

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Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Dual LAN Gigabit
• 1394
• SATA RAID
• Voltage tweaks for overclocking
• Quiet

Cons 坏处:

• No IDE RAID
• 2 DIMM slots
• Need to remove HDD bracket to install graphics card

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Product Excellence 2003