Conclusion and thoughts
It's always nice, from the consumers' eyes, to see competition in any field. Competition usually leads to innovation, a rise in standards, and, most importantly, choice. Shuttle's range of XPCs has dominated the mini barebones market for a while now. The cubes' success has spurred competitors into producing their own variants. Soltek has come up with a design that's sure to please many. Aesthetically, the EQ3702M is a serious looker, with attention to style and form. We like the fact that ports, slots and sockets are hidden away until required. It gives this cube a clean, uncluttered look.Its larger dimensions allow Soltek to play around with drive mounting and component replacement. For the power user, there's space for a couple of optical drives and a 3.5" drives. There's serious storage ability on offer, and with hard drive companies ever willing to expand the capacities of modern drives, it's possible to include almost a terabyte of storage potential; a scary thought. Cooling is well catered for via the QBIC system.
The nForce2-powered Soltek displayed benchmarking prowess along the lines of a decent, full-size board. It's a shame, then, that we don't have official 200MHz FSB support and all that entails with respect to performance. On-board graphics, too, were a cut above what we're used to, both in performance and 2D clarity. Add to this dual on-board VGA-Out and S-Video-Out for excellent connectivity, along with decent sound from NVIDIA's capable APU, and a multimedia box is born. There's a lot going on but stability wasn't compromised through a week-long testing and benchmarking run.
It's not without its faults, though. Attaching the CPU cooler is an unnecessarily tedious and time-consuming affair. There's no S-Video cable to take advantage of the EQ3702M's display abilities, and installation of various components can be a little unwieldy at times. There's also no SATA support, something which is almost perfect for the small internal dimensions of a mini barebones unit. A Silicon Image 31x2 controller would have been most welcome.
A decent SFF barebones outfit should question the need for larger desktop or midi-tower boxes, especially for the non-power user. The Soltek does exactly that. Overall, however, the Soltek EQ3702 mini barebones PC covers most of its intended bases well. It's fast, stable, quiet, feature-rich in just the right areas and, subjectively speaking, looks cool. A genuine contender in the popular SFF market.
