Last week I finally had a chance to order up a new HTPC case for my test HTPC. Previously I was running a a Q Pack cube case, which served its purpose while I had it, but it just wasn’t what I needed or what I wanted for a real HTPC. I had recently returned some items to newegg and couldn’t get my money returned, all I could do was get “in store credit” for the items. So with that extra money that I needed to spend I set out looking for the cheapest HTPC case, that still looked decent and got decent reviews. I eventually found this case.
Some of the requirements for the HTPC that I was looking for when searching for a new case where:
- Cost – had to be cheap enough, and not break the bank
- Looks – had to look half way decent, and not stick out like a sore thumb
- Power – had to have a PSU
- Color – had to come in black
- Size – had to fit a micro ATX motherboard, and be low profile, and small form factor
So with that in mind I started searching AVS Forums and newegg to see what was out there, and what others where getting. The HEC case kept coming up over and over again, however with mixed reviews. Some folks loved the case for its “bang for the buck” which is what I was looking for, while others said the case was too restrictive and didn’t work out all that well. For me I was willing to forgo the down sides to the case from the reviews that I read it seemed to be what I was looking for.
Last week the case came in and I started to swap out the motherboard, DVD drive, and all of that into the new case. One of the first things I did notice was that this definitely is a tight fitting case. Getting the motherboard and ram to fit in was a chore in of itself.
I had to remove the PSU to access the hard drive carriage bay which wasn’t all that bad however with the limited space, trying to figure out some form of wire organization/management at the same time, was beginning to be more tasking than I had imagine. I even had to swap out the ram sticks I was using with the ram I had in my office pc. I was using Corsair XMS2 with the extra tall heat sinks which caused a fitment problem with my DVD drive bay. So I put the XMS2 ram into my office desktop pc, and took the normal height ram and installed it into the test pc here so I could mount my DVD drive.
Once I figured out the intricacies and quirks of the case, things finally started to get put together and was able to complete the install. I have this test HTPC located in my bedroom which I share duties with a linksys DMA 2100. I have the test HTPC to use for testing out the new builds of windows 7, as well as test out new third party plug-ins and applications. I also use it as a DVD juke box as currently I can’t get DVD streaming on my extenders unless I re-encode all of my ripped dvd’s, which at this point in time I am not willing to do. This also allows me to have a better upscaling dvd player in my bedroom which until now I haven’t had before.
Over all I wouldn’t call this a case for beginners or noobs. You will easily get frustrated and not want to use this case if you try and use this case as your first PC build let alone a HTPC build. I would say that if you are accustom to building pc’s and understand how small form factor cases work and understand the limitations of how they work, then this might just be a choice for a good looking, budget minded HTPC case. For me the case works well. Its a solid build, looks great, and works well with the AMD 780G mobo and cpu setup I installed in this case. The PSU is a little on the weaker side, but I am running a low power 4850e 45watt cpu and a 640gig WD “green” drive so I wasn’t worried at all about the PSU. So again after everything it still is a pretty good choice for a budget HTPC case.
If you have any questions or comments register and post them up.
- Josh
[...] hard drive. What I liked about the build was he ended up choosing the same HTPC I had just recently purchased and reviewed. As pointed out the HTPC case is a great bang for the buck, for under $50 you can’t go wrong with [...]