Soltek Computer unveiled their new series of barebone systems at the end of the year 2002. Since small form-factor personal computers are very popular nowadays, there is no surprise that mainboard manufacturers bring more and more of them to the market. The one thing is still a bit confusing for me: SFF PCs seem to be generally associated with Shuttle’s Cubes (XPCs) and not only end-users say “Cube” when talking about barebones, but even computer components makers just love Shuttle’s computers. At least, Soltek definitely does.

Please welcome: Soltek Qbic, the “almost” twin brother of Shuttle’s Cube XPC.

Soltek will firstly release Qbic EQ series & IQ series that adopt Intel i845GE chipset based mainboard. As you see, there are four kinds of cases: with Mirror Phase Plate and Pearl White Plate and with either one or two 5.25” extension bays.

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with 3.06GHz clock-speed and above;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• i845GE chipset, including i82845GE GMCH and i82801DA ICH4;
• 2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2100 or PC2700 (533MHz FSB) DDR SDRAM memory.
• Integrated Intel Extreme Graphics videoadapter with DVI add-on card support;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• USB 2.0 ports;
• 3 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter;
• 6-channel audio solution with SPDIF support;

There is no word about AGP presence and the number of PCI slots in the systems. Of course, powerful graphics is not something to be expected from a barebone system, however, Intel Integrated Graphics is definitely not enough for home-users addicted to multimedia and computer games.

I wonder why Soltek decided to use almost the same design of the case as Shuttle. Are there no designers to design computer cases at Soltek or all of them are now dedicated to develop golden mainboards (see this and this news-stories)?