Expansion Capabilities : Four Quiet and Powerful Mini PCs for Intel CPUs

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Expansion Capabilities

12:57 - Thursday 6 July 2006 by Siggy Moersch
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: four, quiet, and, powerful, mini, pcs, for, intel, cpus, uk

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Expansion Capabilities

Slots for one PCIe and one PCI 32-bit expansion card

In the design of its expansion slots, Biostar demonstrates that you can make room for more than two cards in a mini-PC. The iDEQ 350G accommodates one PCIe 16x and one PCI 32-bit slot on the right side of the motherboard, with a PCIe x1 slot on the left side, plus a mini-PCI slot on the underside as well. All told, that adds up to four expansion slots, which should be sufficient for most buyers.

The tricky part of this proposition comes down to their placement, rather than their quantity. The Mini-PCI slot is designed for a WLAN module, but whatever interface of this type you might wish to install must be accessed from the bottom of the case. The PCIe x1 connector is on the left side of the box as you face the front. While you can insert compatible cards into this slot, they can't be too long, or they'll collide with the DIMM sockets where the system RAM resides.

Things get even trickier on the other side of the case with the other two sockets. You can indeed use both of them, but you must make sure to pick a graphics card that's sufficiently narrow to leave the other one clear. Unfortunately, this removes from consideration most high-end graphics cards (such as 7x00 Nvidia or ATI x1x00 models).