Soltek EQ3702A Qbic II

[mjgreen1979]

Hi All,

Am new to the forum, but been on hexus.net site quite often looking over the good reviews.

Am just wondering what your thoughts are on the following!

I bought a Shuttle XPC SN41G2, 2800XP, 80Gb HD, 512Mb RAM just to be used as a basic business PC, am very impressed with the shuttle build although I don't use the PC that often am not hearing any problems with it.

Am now thinking of buying a Soltek EQ3702A Qbic II for myself, mainly because i have a spare 3000XP AMD, 80GB Seagate HD, 512 Matrix DDR RAM, 52x CD-Writer and basic Geo-force 32MB Graphics card.

I love the SFF PCs purely because of their size, style and build. Really impressed, I want to go for the above model so I can have say a DVD-ROM and DVD Writer, as it as 2 bays? So I can use this as a DVD writer PC..

Is this a good buy, anything better on the market? Should I stick with shuttle?

Thanks for any help.

[Gunbuster]

I like mine, its not the quietest, but I've changed a few bits in it to my liking.
What kind of geforce is it the onboard is pretty good, certainly geforce 2 gts/ geforce 4 mx level. Not tried it with both bays yet, I think it should be ok. The free cpu cooler is ok, but I have a 2500+ rather than tha 3000+. You get a carry bag with the soltek too.
As for anything better I dunno, not tried any others, we have a shuttle at work and its 'ok'.

[mjgreen1979]

Thanks for the reply.

My AGP card is a Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2 GTS (an old spare 1 lying about) I would probably be just as well using the onboard graphics.

Is the heatsink supplied be enough for cooling an athlon xp 3000? Am not going to be overclocking or anything.

I was going to purchase from ebuyer.com is there any other sites that are good priced?

Michael

[Gunbuster]

I think the cooler is fine (its pure copper folded), I have mine turned right down with speedfan below 'silent' mode so silent to quiet on the cpu fan or case fan should be ok. Also I have a passively cooled Radeon 9600XT in so you should be ok without. There is a new version called the EQ3705 which comes with a 250watt psu, but as you won't have a huge vga card and pci card in you should be ok.

I wouldn't bother with the Elsa, keep it as a spare for something else, the onboard will do twin view, though it works much better with the twin ddr ram thing Nforce2s do.

I bought mine from ebuyer.com they were fine.

[mjgreen1979]

Think I will just stick to onboard too. How do you mean twin view?? What does this allow me to do?

[Gunbuster]

Connect two monitors to it.

[mjgreen1979]

With the same desktops? Why would you want to do that? (sorry to be asking stupid questions)

[Gunbuster]

no two desktops, effectively giving you double the space, like two 1024x768s would become 2048x768