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As usual, the lid from the EQ3901A case can be easily removed, you just have to unscrew three wing nuts on the rear panel. Another two screws hold the drive cage, four latches hold the front panel. Thus, Soltek offers convenient access to system innards and provides easy assembly and upgrade procedures for this minicomputer.
But again, this unusual hard disk installation into the bottom section of the cage was already implemented in the EQ3401: it is installed transverse to the PC case instead of lengthwise (as floppy drives). That makes it easy to connect cables to the hard disk and saves much space in the bottom part of the PC case. Besides, the EQ3901 solves the problem of the first "cubes" with the similar construction of a drive cage: lengthy straight connector of a SATA-cable did not allow normal installation of a hard disk (either the cable stuck out of the PC case or the hard disk couldn't be fixed with four screws). In this case the bundle includes two SATA-cables with 90° bent connectors, which take up almost no "horizontal" space.
You will have to remove the front panel to install floppy drives, which is a very easy thing to do, as I have already mentioned it. You may also need to align the eject buttons on the PC case and on the drive. Maximum possible EQ3901 "configuration" is 4 drives; they are easy to connect, interface cables can be neatly laid under the drive cage. Besides, there is no need in laying any other interface cables in the PC case (interface connectors for the front panel are cleverly located on the front edge of the motherboard), and power cables are neatly laid along the case racks with the help of holes in the racks and clips from the bundle. As a result, nothing blocks access to functional elements and vent holes – it's a strong point of Soltek barebone-kits.
Qbic EQ3901 is based on the Soltek B9D-FGR motherboard on VIA K8T800Pro+VT8237 (maximum HT bus frequency is increased to 1000 MHz compared to the K8T800). Almost in any article that features Athlon 64 we mention that the chipset choice has practically no effect on the performance of final solutions, and the inexpensive VIA product is quite justified from this point of view. Unfortunately K8T800/Pro lacks integrated video, so that you'll have to buy a video card even if you don't need 3D features at all. However, at the time the EQ3901 was announced, the market of integrated solutions offered (only theoretically, as there were almost no such products in practice) only VIA and SiS chipsets, and the speed of integrated video in 3D wasn't even nameworthy. However, when this article was written, ATI Xpress 200 series chipsets were already available, and we hope to see a Soltek Qbic model based on such a chipset in the nearest future.
Now let's return to the B9D-FGR motherboard and list its features provided by the chipset: support for AMD Athlon 64/FX and Sempron (Socket 939), up to 2 GB of DDR200/266/333/400 RAM (the motherboard has only 2 DIMM slots) capable of operating in dual-channel mode, AGP 8x bus for external video accelerators, two SATA ports supporting RAID 0 and 1, two UATA133 channels for 4 devices, 8 USB 2.0 ports (6 of them are standard ports) and 8-channel audio (Realtek ALC850 AC'97-codec). Besides, this motherboard contains a VIA VT6307 controller, which provides two FireWire ports, and Realtek RTL8110S network adapter (10/100/1000 Mbit/sec Gigabit Ethernet). There is one AGP and one PCI slot (a standard solution for Shuttle and Soltek barebone-kits) designed for full-sized expansion cards (AGP is closer to the board edge, which excludes video accelerators with bulky cooling systems). The board contains an IrDA connector to plug standard devices, it has a CD-In, there are also three fan headers, two of them are controlled by Smart Fan technology.
The integrated audio quality was tested in 16bit, 44 kHz using the RightMark
Audio Analyzer 5.4 test application and the Terratec
DMX 6fire sound card:
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General performance: Good.
Motherboards in modern barebone-kits always provide overclocking functions and Soltek B9D-FGR is not an exception. BIOS Setup allows to increase FSB frequency to 250 MHz at 1 MHz steps, to raise AGP and memory voltage to 2.9 and 1.8 V correspondingly at 0.1 V steps, to modify CPU voltage from 0.8 to 1.7 V at 0.025 V steps, as well as to control timing settings and fix PCI/AGP bus frequencies. 300 W power supply unit and a good 3-phase switching voltage regulator of the processor prove that Soltek EQ3901 is ready to squeeze everything possible from its componentry. Jumpers on the motherboard allow to reset CMOS (this jumper is in a very convenient location, you just have to remove the lid of the PC case to use it) and to enable wake on PS/2 devices (this feature is enabled for USB-devices).
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Sergei Pikalov (peek@ixbt.com) January 17, 2005 |