Home Theater/Media Center PC's are now becoming more of the norm than the exception.  A few of the common problems associated with putting one of these units in your living room is that they still look like a computer sitting next to all of your stereo and surround sound equipment.  Aside from looking like a computer, they sound like one too and finally they usually sit in a tight area and have cooling problems.  Never fear!  Antec has an offering that will make that media center system look right at home, be quiet as a church mouse and keep it's cool for many enjoyable hours of home entertainment.

Features:

• Aluminum plate front bezel with Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) and Volume Control to work with media center applications. Includes space for user-mounted IR Receiver

• Triple chamber structure to separate heat and noise of power supply, hard drives and motherboard for cooler and quieter operation

• Quiet high-efficiency 430 Watt ATX12V v2.0 power supply with universal input and active PFC

• Removable HDD brackets with extra soft silicone grommets to reduce vibrational noise

• Advanced cooling system:
  - 2 x side mounted 120mm TriCool™ 3-speed fans

• Low profile desktop height to fit in any environment

• 3 Drive Bays
  - Front Accessible: 1 x 5.25"
  - Internal 2 x 3.5"

• 4 Expansion Slots

• Motherboard: Micro ATX form factor (9.6" x 9.6")

• Front-mounted ports for easy multimedia connections
  - 2 x USB 2.0
  - 1 x IEEE 1394 (FireWire®, i.Link®)
  - Audio In and Out

• Durable 0.8mm cold rolled steel construction

The Skinny:

Can Antec come up with the goods and deliver a media center case that delivers?  Lets dive in and take a look and see. 

Looking at the front of the box the case comes in, it has a nice layout, gives you a view of the front of the case and lists some of the possible uses.

Looking at the back, more detailed features and specifications are shown.  Nice to have a pretty good idea what you are buying before you buy it.

Open up the top of the box and it shows a nice packing job to ensure the one you buy will come exactly as it was when it was manufactured.

     First look at the chassis shows the aluminum bezel.  A very nice face for a media center PC.  From left to right the components are: Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD), optical drive bay with matching cover, firewire port, 2 USB ports, microphone jack, audio jack, hard drive activity light, reset button, power button and the big knob is the volume control.

     Looking on the right side shows the two monster TriCool 120mm fans that provide the cooling.  After messing with cooling for years there is no substitute for fan size if you want a quiet system.

     The rear view shows all the standard stuff you would expect with a PC, motherboard IO opening, expansion slots and power supply.  There is an extra grille opening over the motherboard face plate.  Looking into the documentation, that is the air input for the CPU.  I will look at this more closely later in the review.

The left side shows some more grilles.  These are cool air intake vents for the power supply.

      Rounding out the outside inspection is a look at the bottom.  We see some more air intake grilles which will keep the hard drives cool and happy.  You can also see the anti-vibration mounts for the drives.  These were soft and squishy, so they should work very well at eliminating any drive noise being transmitted through the case.

      Now lets open the top and see what's inside.  You can see three compartments, power supply, motherboard and the hard drives.  Antec calls this the "Triple Chamber Structure" and states that it isolates the heat and noise from each other resulting in a much quieter and cooler operation than a traditional desktop case.  That remains to be seen.  Also of not are the wires coming from the front panel, most are familiar, some are new.  Of the ones that are new, is a USB cable for the volume control and VFD display and a power connection that uses a floppy drive power connector to power the VFD.  Since you really don't use floppy drives anymore, it's nice that Antec found a use for it without using yet another Molex connector.

     Here's everything else that is included with the case.  The big black square in the top right is a block off for one of the 120mm fan spots, the black square underneath that are the extensions for the CPU air guide, which we will look at closer later in the review.  Something you don't normally get with a case is a driver disk.  This has the drivers and programs for the volume control and the VFD.  The Fusion also comes with Antec's AQ3 3 year warranty, one of the best in the business.