Thinking outside the box
The iDEQ is coated with a gorgeous glossy black finish that manages to be both understated and sexy at the same time. It's like that little black dress every woman seems to have in her closet.
Speaking of little, the 330P is several inches shorter than Shuttle's new P-Series chassis. However, the iDEQ is deeper and wider, and consequently only 5% smaller by volume than a P-Series XPC. At 355mm x 215mm x 185mm, the iDEQ is exactly as tall as Shuttle's G-Series chassis, but the narrower, shallower Shuttle system is 20% smaller by volume.
A grilled air intake dominates the front of the iDEQ's face plate. Over on the left, we see an integrated 7-in-1 memory card reader that should come in handy considering that the system lacks an external 3.5" drive bay.
Floppy fans will have to use external drives, since the iDEQ's motherboard lacks a floppy connector. Given the floppy drive's waning popularity, the lack of a floppy connector seems like a minor issue. However, Windows XP's installation routine can only load third-party storage drivers from a floppy disk. The XP installation script has no problem recognizing single drives connected to the nForce4, but RAID arrays aren't detected correctly, so users will have to slipstream NVIDIA's RAID drivers into an XP installation CD in order to install Windows XP to a RAID array on the 330P.
Note that unlike most, Biostar doesn't cover the iDEQ's front-mounted expansion ports. This provides easier access to the ports, but doesn't look quite as clean.
Fortunately, Biostar hides the optical drive bay behind a stealthy black door. An adjustable trigger activates the optical drive's eject button, but it's a little hard to reach with the tray open.
Moving to the sides of the system, we find plenty of ventilation holes. The vents aren't backed up by any system fans to direct or force airflow, so convection will have to do.
There aren't any fans around the back of the system, either. That open grill in the middle of the back face is attached to the system's blower, and there's no external fan on the power supply. The 300W PSU does, however, have a small internal fan that faces the motherboard.
Below the blower outlet, the iDEQ's port cluster reveals few surprises. The system has plenty of USB, Firewire, and audio ports at both the front and rear of the case. Biostar even throws in a couple of S/PDIF ports, with a digital audio output at the rear and an input up front.
