The Install:

     Installing the optical drive was a snap.  Once you have the top of the case off, you just lift out the drive cage and install your drive into it.  There is very little adjustment on it and I found that I had to move the drive to the farthest forward position to get it to contact the open/close button on the front of the case and have it function.

Here is the optical drive installed in the cage.

And here it is back in the case ready for duty.

     Installing hard drives was just about as easy.  You remove the four screws from the upper mount and drop the drive in with the connectors pointed towards the left side of the case.  Before we put the drive in you can see the bottom mounts, and the anti-shock pads mounted on each side of the drive keepers.  All were made from the same cushy soft material.

Here it is with the drive installed.  They supplied the special screws that match up with the anti-vibration mounts.

     Finishing up the build, I used a MSI K8MM-V motherboard, two 512MB sticks of DDR-400 memory and a AMD Sempron 64 bit processor with an Arctic Cooling heatsink.  For add-on cards I used a generic wireless network card, Dvico Fusion HDTV5 Gold Plus tuner card and a Nvidia GeForce 6200 256MB video card.  If you look at the back of the case by the CPU you can see the cooling grille.  Just to the right of that is the CPU Air Guide we mentioned previously.  What the air guide does is force the cool air to not take a direct turn towards the dual 120mm fans but take the path over the CPU heatsink, then make the turn towards the case fans.  Net result should be cooler temps for the CPU.

Here's a look from the back, I used the supplied cable routing ties to tidy things up and maximize airflow.

     And another view from the side.  The optical drive cage had plenty of space underneath it to stuff away the extra cables I wasn't using.  The power supply had both Molex and SATA power connectors, since I was using a SATA drive I opted for the SATA connectors.

     So all this buttoned up and plugged in how does it work?  At first I set the tri-cool fans at the medium setting.  The result was 32 degree temps with a little noise over ambient in a quiet room.  Fairly respectable, but I knew it could do better.  I turned the fans down to the low setting and tried that.  The computer noise disappeared completely with only a few degrees increase in temps which is perfectly acceptable to me.  You can see it's on, but there is no tell tale fan noise to be heard.  The power supply performed just as well providing stable power under a full load.  All settings were well within their parameters.  I would have used Motherboard Monitor, but it just plain doesn't work consistently with MSI motherboards.  PCAlert is provided by MSI and it works very well.

     Here is a look at the unit tucked away in my home entertainment cabinet.  Notice the custom message on the VFD.  Using the supplied software you can set that to display a multitude of things.

     Looking at the setup tab you can see that you can display the currently playing media information, check for new email, display daily news headlines, current weather for any city that you choose, a graphical equalizer or your system information, choosing the parameters that are most important to you.  There truly are more options that you will want to use.  I narrowed mine down to the media info that is playing, current weather and temperature and a graphical equalizer when I'm listening to music.

Conclusion

     Out of the box this case was everything I wished it could be and more.  The triple chamber design was well thought out and functional and kept the CPU cool even under full load in a enclosed area.  Installing the drives was a snap and setting the motherboard in place was just as easy.  The VFD is the icing on the cake for the gadget freak in all of us.  Currently this case sells at NewEgg for $164.99 ($25 instant savings, normally $189.99) with $16.21 shipping.  Kind of spendy for a computer case, but you have to remember where you will be putting it.  In plain view, spend a few bucks more for something that will perform as well as it looks.  For a HTPC/Media Center I can't find any negatives at all.  Actually for a PC enclosure the only thing that would be a negative would be the big volume control knob on the front.  In my opinion this case gets as close to perfection for a computer enclosure than anything else I've ever used.  Both thumbs way up!

Club Overclocker Rating
Innovation:	10 out of 10
Performance:	10 out of 10
Quality:	10 out of 10
Stability:	N/A
Overclocking:	N/A
Software/Drivers Pack:	10 out of 10
Value:	8.0 out of 10
Overall Rating 9.5
Skill Level
Project Skill Level (10 being hardest)	4 out of 10