Biostar iDEQ 250N review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 19 Feb 2007

Price when reviewed: £117

Supplier: http://www.aria.co.uk

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

The iDEQ 250N is one of four cube-shaped barebones PCs in this month's Labs, and the only one that's ideal as the basis of a small office PC. It's inexpensive, and has lots of room for expansion.

The iDEQ isn't especially easy to build, with most problems caused by its confusing instruction manual. The instructions on each page are in several languages, and the black-and-white photos are small and not especially clear. There's plenty of room to work inside the case, but making the optical drive line up with the front of the case isn't easy. Cables block the screw holes once the drive is in place, so adjusting its position is difficult. Instead of a door on the front of the case that automatically opens with the optical drive tray, there's a flap on the front that you must slide down to access the optical drive.

Despite its small size, the iDEQ 250N has space for one IDE and two SATA hard disks. The hard disks can also be arranged in a RAID 0 or 1 array for extra speed or security. The iDEQ 250N was the second-fastest AM2 system in our benchmarks, producing an overall score of 147, and there's room inside for a PCI Express x16 graphics card if you want one.

If Shuttle's SS21T is too big but you want to fit more than one hard disk and PCI Express graphics, the iDEQ is a good buy. It's fiddly to build, though, so if you have the space we recommend the SS21T.

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