A few more bumps on the road to happiness
Beyond the slowdowns caused by Biostar's System Control program, I found a handful of other problems with the iDEQ 200P that made the user experience difficult. For starters, it had very serious memory-related stability problems. The iDEQ 200P would not play nice with some of the DIMMs I tried in it, including several different matched pairs of DDR400 memory from Corsair of varying sides and SPD types. When I could get the 200P to boot with a pair of XMS3200LL DIMMs installed, the system wasn't entirely stable in Windows. I attempted to back off the timings by setting them manually, but no matter what I tried, the system wouldn't POST with manual RAM timings.

Repeat the account above five or six times, and you have some idea what it was like working with the 200P. Magnify by the fact that every failed POST required removal of the 3.5" hard drive cage and reset of that nearly inaccessible CMOS jumper I told you about. The iDEQ 200P wasn't making any friends with this act, especially because Biostar offers no apparent means of recovering from a bad BIOS setting by holding down a hotkey at boot time or anything like that.

Finally, I settled on a pair of Kingmax 256MB DDR400 DIMMs with a not-very-aggressive SPD (CAS latency 2.5) for testing. They have less RAM and more relaxed timings than the DIMMs I used on our MSI K8T Neo comparison motherboard, but I had to take what the 200P was willing to give.

The iDEQ was generally stable in Windows with the Kingmax RAM, but nothing I could try—four or five different pairs of DIMMs, using a single DIMM, running the RAM at 333MHz—would allow the 200P to finish a memory benchmark. SiSoft Sandra's memory bandwidth benchmark would produce a reboot, as did cachemem. This problem wasn't just a quirk of my particular review unit, either. Mike Schuette of LostCircuits ran into the same problems.

I asked Biostar what to do about this issue, and I was told to try raising the memory voltage as high as possible. Unfortunately, 2.85 volts didn't resolve the problem, and 2.9V caused the system not to POST, leaving me no choice but to clear the CMOS again.

As a result, the benchmarks you'll see below are incomplete. They don't include memory performance, of course, but they also don't include some forms of testing we generally do for verification, like USB, Ethernet, audio, and disk I/O performance. We're often just checking for basic competency in these areas, but in the case of the iDEQ 200P, we spent the majority of our time troubleshooting memory problems. Finally, our time and patience ran out. We already have enough data to know what we think of the iDEQ 200P without delving into Ethernet CPU utilization numbers.