I was trolling Newegg.com the other day looking for a cheap socket 754 board to stick in my wife’s machine when I stumbled onto one of these little Soltek cubes. Newegg had a refurb at a pretty decent price (about half off, actually) so I thought I’d grab one and see what I thought. It arrived while I was at EHX, so I had something to play with when I got home.

Soltek shipped it inside the padded backpack that comes as an accessory, which actually seems to give it decent protection. I ran a check for blemishes or other obvious ‘refurb’ type problems, but nothing stood out, so I got to disassembly.

First gripe: the plastic on this thing seems kind of cheesy. I’m talking GoBot plastic cheesy. As I was CAREFULLY popping the fronot of the case off, one the little tabs snapped. Not a good start. I got that sort of vibe from the other plastic components (and there are a lot of them), so durability may be a problem. Build quality from Shuttle SFF systems I’ve built has been much better.

Gripe two – there’s VERY little clearance between the back of the optical drives and the power supply. This made positioning the drives so the buttons on the front panel would work a little dicey, but I was able to pull it off. I had to remove the bezel on my older TDK Mojo burner for it to work properly with the doors, but no big deal. One interesting feature was the ability to slide the little widget that rests on the drive’s eject button to the best postiion. A good idea, possibly, but the drive bays on my Lian Li don’t have it, and they seem to work very well. Adjusting the position of the actuator didn’t really seem to change the eject function.

One thing to note – if you’re planning to run two optical drives, you’ll probable want to opt for a Serial ATA hard drive. That will keep cable clutter to a minimum. Soltek doesn’t supply enough IDE cables for three devices (at least not in the refurb kit I got). I didn’t have an SATA drive around, so I ordered one and will finish the build when it arrives.

I did fire the system up, and was very pleased with the noise levels. It seemed much quieter than some of the Micro ATX builds I’ve done. The big side blower seems to move a lot of air, and the stock heatsink that came with the Celeron chip I planned to use is fairly quiet too. The 915g chipset makes good use of temp sensors and only spins up the fan as needed. This was about half the time I was working on it, but then again I had the case open. I’ll have a more solid idea of noise once I get things put together.

I’ll be sticking with the onboard video for now, which is the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900. From my reading it should be fine for streaming some TV from my Windows Media Center and playing Guild Wars here and there. There is a PCI Express 16x slot if I need a little more horsepower.

Anyway, so far I’m actually fairly satisfied with the build. A couple of complaints, but we’ll see how it performs once it’s all put together.