Silverstone is still a fairly young brand in the case market, but with their background at ATCS, they are more than qualified in creating good quality chassis. One area they seem to excel, is in creating cases for the HTPC (Home Theater PC) environment. The case above is their latest addition to this market, the LC04.

The case is available in both black and silver. These are colours that tend to fit in anywhere. The case has a sleek finish, with a simplistic front with one switch and a couple of lights. The acrylic on the front has a mirror finish. To keep with the Hi-Fi theme they’ve even fitted Hi-Fi style feet onto the case.

The front panel is spring loaded and geared so it opens slowly and has a quality feel to it. Behind the panel there are audio connections, two USB and one 6 pin firewire port.

The back is very similar to the LC02. There is room for two case fans (one on top near the CPU fan, and one near the PCI/AGP area), the fans themselves are not included however.

Much like other HTPC cases, it doesn’t take a standard ATX PSU, it uses a Flex ATX PSU. The shipped model is 240W conforming to the Intel TFX standards. This doesn't sound like much, but Silverstone tell us it has been sucessfully tested with a Prescott P4 3.4Ghz.

The modest case ventilation makes fitting a processor this hot rather unpractical, and we feel most buyers would prefer to fit a low-power Sempron with Cool 'N Quiet and a cool hard drive such as the Samsung Spinpoint for the sake of silence and stability. This kind of system wouldn't overstretch the PSU or cooling, and allow headroom for a respectable mid-range graphics card too.

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