Heading inside, you can see that this case is not entirely made
of aluminium. The top plate is steel, where you would attach a slim-line optical
drive and a hard disk. 4 screws later, we get to see underneath where there
is room for a full sized ATX motherboard. The screw mounts were already attached
to the chassis, which made installing our motherboard even easier. With only
a 220w power supply, you certainly aren't going to want to be installing a
Prescott and a 6800 Ultra in a hurry, but for it's application, this should
be fine.
There isn't a sharp edge in sight on this chassis, so I felt
quite happy to get down and dirty installing an EQS 9100IGP board. I found
it quite difficult to install the back plate, taking a lot of pushing, almost
to the point of bending the case!
I'm sure you will have noticed the 2 expansion slots on their
side above, and this is where the supplied riser cards come in handy.
We plugged these into our motherboard and successfully installed
a Geforce 5600 and a PCI network card. But, after measuring up with our Epia
CL10000, don't expect to be able to use these with a Mini-ITX board.
5600 and NIC installed without a hitch.
Conclusion
Silverstone have once again produced a product to be proud of.
If you are building a media center, this is definitely worth considering.
It is available in both black and silver with full specifications here.
We found the cheapest price of this case, was £113.51 at Special Tech.
This is quite a hefty sum but this is a niche product so you have to expect prices to be high. You also have
to take into account the inclusion of the PSU and riser cards. If you want
a quality product, you are going to have to pay for it.
