Competition is always good for the consumer, there is no way around that. With the number of manufacturers competing in the SFF PC business, we are seeing innovative and advancing designs emerging almost weekly. Gone are the days of poorly equipped SFF PCs which lacked support for even the most basic of AGP videocards; now consumers have a choice between AMD or Intel platforms, a variety of chipsets, and even AGP and PCI Express videocard support. The only aspect remaining to be dealt with by motherboard makers are universally upgradeable motherboards for these tiny little PCs...

In any case, we all know the lineage of the SFF PC can be traced back to Shuttle, which took a gamble to devote 30% of its production towards making SFF PCs. That gamble paid off, and now its name is synonymous with Small Form Factor computers. Thankfully, the competition has caught up, prices have come down, and SFF PCs are no longer the domain of just one company.

Through competing companies, the SFF PC has evolved from a bite-sized desktop replacement concept, into a Home Theatre PC, multimedia and audio station, and killer gaming rig. IWill has even recently introduced a dual AMD Opteron workstation class SFF PC, which it showed off during Computex 2004 to significant fanfare.

Soltek EQ340IM QBiC Small Form Factor PC Includes: Users Manual, Quick Installation Guide, Motherboard QIG, two Serial ATA cables, Molex to Serial ATA power cable, two IDE cables, Floppy drive cable, Power cord, Utilities CD and carry bag. No heatsink is included.

In this review, PCstats is investigating what the Soltek QBIC miniPC has to offer. This is a bare bones Small Form Factor (SFF) PC, based on the Intel i865G chipset and Pentium 4 800MHz FSB processor architecture. Soltek's EM340IM QBiC model supports any current Pentium 4 Northwood CPU, so if you don't need a lot of power simply get yourself an inexpensive chip and you're all set.

The Soltek QBiC is as well equipped as any SFF PC on the market; with an 8X AGP and PCI slot for peripheral expansion, integrated 5.1-channel audio, IEEE 1394 firewire, 10/100 LAN and onboard video care of the i865G. Its two DDR DIMM slots support up to 2 GB of RAM.

However, because you need matching pairs to run in dual channel mode, you had better buy what you need right from the start! For test purposes, we used a pair of 256MB Corsair TwinX 3200LL DDR RAM.

Oh, and before I forget to mention it, the Soltek QBiC also comes with its own carry bag - a small knapsack. Definitely a cool accessory LAN gamers will no doubt appreciate, but we're left wondering why include this and not a heatsink? Next, a look inside the QBiC!