In the belly of the Biostar

You can pop either side panel off the iDEQ 200P by removing a single thumbscrew. I'm unsure whether I prefer this arrangement to the Shuttle XPC approach, where the entire top shell of the case is made from one piece of metal secured by three thumbscrews. However, the iDEQ approach does make swapping a single component, like a DIMM or PCI card, a relative breeze.

The side panels must be removed before the top panel, because the side panels secure themselves to the top. Once all three covers are removed, the iDEQ's tight interior is exposed. The two inches or so of space between the CD drive and the power supply in the picture above isn't much to work with, believe me. The power and ATA connector barely fit with a regular sized CD drive, and there's little wiggle room for sliding back the drive tray in order to remove it.

However, the arrangement for 3.5" internal drives is just peachy. A separate drive tray slides in under the 5.25" tray and tension-locks into place (there's also a thumbscrew, so the computer will remain intact in the event of a killer asteroid strike.) This transverse-mounted 3.5" drive cage will hold a pair of drives, one-upping the XPC in a critical way. I like it.

The drive cage's proximity to the side of the case makes space very tight for Serial ATA power and I/O connectors. Fortunately, Biostar includes a neatly right-angled version of each with the iDEQ 200P. Unfortunately, one SATA drive does not a RAID array make. Biostar should have included a second set of cables.

With the drive cage removed, the iDEQ 200P seems very roomy indeed, at least for an SFF box. Oddly, though, the extra room seems little bit wasted because, as you can see, the CPU cooler still resides halfway beneath the power supply, and access to the CPU socket is rather tight.

Speaking of tight fits, I was just able to shoehorn a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card into the iDEQ 200P, a feat simply not possible inside a Shuttle box. Once installed, the card worked as expected, although I have my doubts about running it long term off the iDEQ power supply. Once and only once, I had a 3DMark run with the 5900 Ultra abort on me with a message about insufficient power to the graphics card. However, I tightened up the aux power connector and never saw the message again.