Opening 'er up
Getting at the Qbic's internals is easy. Pop a few thumbscrews, slide off the outer skin, and you're in. While you're at it, you might as well pop out the cube's aluminum drive cage, too.

Like Shuttle's G-series chassis, the Qbic has a removable drive cage that houses all of its internal and external drive bays. However, unlike Shuttle's cage, the Qbic's can house two 5.25" drives in addition to internal and external 3.5" drives. Even if you're not looking to run a pair of optical drives, the extra drive bay leaves plenty of room for extra hard drives and makes it possible to run a two-drive RAID array without having to sandwich drives directly on top each other.

If you're only running a single hard drive, it's best to mount it in the cage's lowermost 3.5" bay. This bay is perpendicular to the other drive bays and requires L-shaped power and Serial ATA plugs (which Soltek bundles with the cube) to ensure clearance with the case's side panels.

From the right, the Qbic's internals are dominated by a massive blower that sucks warm air from the case. The blower is secured by a trio of screws, so it takes a minute to remove. That's a little inconvenient, especially since the blower must be removed to access the motherboard's DIMM slots.

This angle nicely illustrates the Qbic's generally clean cable routing. The main power supply cable is neatly sheathed, and a series of hooks and guides keep it from tangling with other cables and obstructing air flow.

The Qbic is considerably more open around the left, where we have plenty of room to access the motherboard's CPU socket, storage ports, and expansion slots. Like most cubes, the EQ3901's AGP slot is on the outside edge of the motherboard, making it incompatible with double-wide graphics coolers without some extensive work with a jigsaw and Dremel.

As far as small form factor motherboards go, the Qbic's SL-B9D-FGR mobo has a pretty standard layout. The motherboard features a 939-pin Athlon 64 socket, but the heat sink retention bracket is a hybrid design that's compatible with both old school P4 coolers and Socket 754/939/940 heat sinks. The extra flexibility is nice, especially since it leaves more enterprising enthusiasts room to experiment with alternative cooling designs.

Interestingly, the Qbic's motherboard gets by with only passive north and south bridge coolers. That should keep noise levels low, especially since smaller north bridge fans tend to get much louder over time.

To the left of the copper-colored south bridge cooler, you can see the Qbic's conveniently-located CMOS reset button. The jumper is located right on the edge of the board, making it easy to reset the BIOS without removing any internal components.