Mini Itx Tower Black

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I bought this case to make a nettop to replace our aging Dell 9300 laptop. This is going to be the new family PC. I wanted something small with a small PSU that would take "normal" parts like the extra HDD and ODD I had lying around no longer being used. To this I added a Gigabyte D525 (dual-core Atom 1.8GHz mini-ITX motherboard with NM10 chipset) and a 2GB ram module. The case itself looks pretty nice though the front is cheap looking plastic that shows fingerprints. It looks like it would scratch very easily. The rest of it is a nice brushed gray metal. Everything fits together nicely with no gaps. It's very small and takes up very little space on my desktop. My wife thinks it's cute.

Building the nettop with this case was pretty straightfoward. The case cover comes off easily with three screws (since replace with thumbscrews) and once removed the case itself is still pretty rigid. I didn't find any sharp edges inside so thankfully no blood was drawn in this build. The motherboard fit easily inside without removing the PSU which is nice. There are four permanent standoffs on the bottom. The front connections were well labelled so it was a matter of following the motherboard instructions to get everything hooked up. Suprisingly, there's actually some extra room inside to route wires and such so cable management is very possible. Installing the HDD was easy although once installed it sits right over the PSU, power cable, SATA and IDE connectors which means everything has to be routed around the end of the HDD. Be sure to hook those up first. Installing the ODD was a lot more painful because it requires endless experimentation with where the ODD sits to get the drive door button to work and for the drive tray to not stick. It need to be nearly perfect. The trick is to leave the screws loose, hook up the power and then keep pressing the door button and moving the drive until it works. Even with that, the drive tray sticks on the door every 1 out of 4 times.

Once built and turned on, the PSU and exhaust fan noise is pretty noticeable but not annoying. It hums along at a nice frequency that's not too hard on the ears. The thin metallic body however acts as an echo chamber. This is by no means a silent case and there is no sound deadening. It's just thin metal that transmit sound and vibration. For a little 150W PSU, the included PSU cranks out quite a bit of heat. I wish it was an 80+ PSU. I have no idea how efficient it is. I plan to get a Kill-A-Watt meter to see just how it fares. The parts are all very low draw so hopefully the PSU is not defeating the whole purpose. I really want the power draw here to be very low.

Overall, for the money and the ability to use desktop parts instead of notebook parts, this case makes for a nice mini-ITX build.

Gigabyte GA-D525TUD dual-core Atom 1.8GHz mini-ITX motherboard

Kingston 1 x 2GB DDR3 1066 RAM

WD 400GB HDD

LiteOn IDE ODD

Rosewill PCI wireless N

Ubuntu 10.04

Buy Mini Itx Tower Black Now

I really like this case a lot. I thought there was plenty of room for my needs. However, if you are using the DVD drive in it, it could become very cramped very quickly. I'm using an external blu-ray player for when I need it so I thought there was plenty of room inside. The computer stays cool and has good circulation. The supplied 80mm case fan is a tad on the loud side and I replaced it with another, silent fan (this is why I gave it 4 stars). Cable management can get tricky quickly.

I would recommend this case to anybody who would like a small build (such as for a HTPC). I would recommend not using the 5.25" bay, but it looks like it would be possible if you needed to. Also the supplied 80mm fan is a tad on the loud side. Overall, a good looking case and fit my needs.