very very quiet, small, portable, cool looking, easy to upgrade
Disadvantages:
not many DIMM slots, not many PCI slots
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
To start off you can get this entire system for around £140 now. I've had this system for over 9 months now, and can give a long term test result/review.
It has built in 100mb LAN, firewire, 4x USB2, onboard sound (which isn't that good in my opinion), digital out, (5.1) and integrated graphics, with handy headphone socket on the front and back.
The case design is excellent, with *all* cables tied and tucked neatly into the case design, which improves airflow considerably! I have never seen a more tidier case! Well done Biostar!
The manuals for installation and setup are clear and concise, and would enable the newbie to setup this PC easily and within an hour i reckon.
One of the reasons I bought this was the fact that the memory is interleaved, thereby giving the maximum theoretical throughput for DDR...mmm tasty...
Another was the fact it was so easy to open up! It has thumbscrews instead of screws ont he case, so that facilitated easy upgrades. The only screw on it was on the PCI/AGP slots, which you could replace with thumbscrews i reckon.
CPU temp for a 2.6Ghz Celery never goes above 26oC. Suitably impressed! Running 1 x 60gb + 1 x 120gb deskstar (one on IDE and one on SATA) with Geforce 5600xt, 2x256mb DDR 3200, 802.11g pci, (cant find a ti4600 anywhere) & pioneer 106 DVD drive. Please note you do not need a heatsink/fan as the unit comes with it's own custom one with heatpipes!
A Very Very fast system and extremely quiet. Fan speed can be adjusted (it's temperature controlled too) making the pc virtually silent.
Blue LEDs are included and was impressed by that! Not quite enough room for a full sized cold cathode tube so I went for a 4 incher.
You will require to buy in addition to this base unit 1/CPU (intel cpu's) 2/RAM (ddr only) 3/hard discs 4/graphics card (if you want to play games) as the built in one is pants (i865 chipset with shared memory)
I've recently upgraded to a radeon 9800 xt, and the power supply supports it! I've heard that the geforce fx 5900's and radeon 9800's need at least a 200w PSU, and this seems to be able to cope well with doom3 and halflife 2. Though since installing it, the temperature inside the case has gone up by 10oC
It's a shame it only has 1 x PCI slot and 1 x AGP slot, and 2 x DIMM slots, so there isn't much scope for expansion, but that's the price you pay for an ultra portable, stylish, quiet and cool PC.
I would recommend this to anyone, and I love my SFF PC to bits! I can't wait to modifiy it!!
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Memory / capacity
Satisfactory
Range of Extra Features
Satisfactory
Instruction manual
Very useful
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