Remember that speech about not judging a book by its cover? Although the Qbic is quite attractive from the outside, open up the case and the cabling is a nightmare. Let's have a closer look:


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Getting an AGP card in there is virtually impossible without first unplugging at least the black Firewire cables towards the left of the picture. One of Soltek's major faults here is that they did not employ a single connector for all of the front panel LEDs and switches, which ends up adding to the clutter.

The other side of the Qbic is relatively clutter free, and is quite reminiscent of Shuttle's own solutions.

Unlike Shuttle, Soltek makes use of a regular parallel port header on the motherboard itself, instead of the low profile header found on the Shuttle motherboards. The benefit of this header is that you can use a standard AT parallel port if you happen to have one laying around.

Other than the cluttered cabling issue, Soltek comes very close to having a Shuttle XPC competitor with their Qbic, but let's find out how it performs before making too bold of a claim.

Soltek Qbic EQ2000 General Usage & Content Creation Performance
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  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link

    Oops -- I should've included this:
    http://www.compuplus.com/insidepage.php3?sid=92hz3...

    The above link has a "spec sheet". Takes a P4 up to 2.8G, etc. etc.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 15, 2003 - link

    MSI has a new "MegaPC" SFF PC with built-in stereo tuner (has a spiffy LCD on the front), model MS6251. If anyone has any experiences with this one, esp. with Linux, please let me know -- I'm emailable at:
    liberty@eskimo.com
  • Odeen - Thursday, August 7, 2003 - link

    Speaking of taking up space on the desk...

    Is it just me, or is it more "efficient" to have a PC on the floor where you'd otherwise have... floor (under a desk, or near it) than to have a cube PC take up desk space that you can otherwise use?
  • Odeen - Thursday, August 7, 2003 - link

    Well, except that the keyboard is two inches thick, there is no AGP slot, the chipset is SiS, and the performance _really_ stinks. :(

    Build an nForce2 IGP in there, let it use standard drives and memory, and make it as inexpensive as shuttle boxen, and it'll be worthwhile :)
  • joedivino - Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - link

    There is an alternative to the Box PC. It is called the "zero-footprint-pc" by Cybernet, it is a complete Pentium 4 based PC inside a normal size keyboard. The CUBE PC types are nothing more than a mini-tower still taking desk space. The Keyboard PC does not take any more than a keyboard on your desktop.
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