nMediaPC HTPC6000B

When I bought this case it was the ONLY one I could find with everything you can think of on the front ports including ESATA, USBx2, firewire, media card reader, and all hidden, all for a very reasonable price.  The case is made of thin metal and does have some flex to it, so careful assembly on a hard surface is necessary.

 

Fits a full ATX motherboard, which means it's very large.  it could have been smaller if the hard drives overlapped the motherboard, but then there would not be space for the 4 drive cages, which is excellent for a high capacity HTPC for archiving movies, pvr tv shows, etc.  I am happy to accept the large footprint in exchange for such large hard drive capacity potential.  It takes approximately the same amount of space as my Yamaha RX-V1900 receiver, but is a little deeper.

 

Unfortunately the ESATA port does not support multiport connections, so my 4 drive external enclosure (non-raid) must be plugged into the motherboard ESATA port instead for backing up all my data.

 

The front face is very clean and attractive, looks right at home in a home entertainment cabinet.  Considering the price, no other case had nearly the same features and possible uses.  Highly recommended for anyone wanting potential for 4 hard drives for large amounts of data archiving.  I also recommend getting a 4 hard drive external enclosure for backup of this data, unless you are using RAID for these drives in the case as a data recovery method.

I purchased this case from Newegg.com to round out my recent HTPC build. I bought this version from nMediaPC because of it's full ATX form factor and it's feature set.

The case is primarily constructed of steel and the top, and sides are finished in a typical audio equipment matte black. The front panel looks very much like an Onkyo receiver it has a brushed aluminum lower drop down panel, a gloss black upper section with a window for the optional OEM Pro VFD display, a chrome power button that looks like a volume knob and is surrounded by a blue LED ring. There is a stealthy DVD drive door that when closed is very smooth, the actual DVD drive hides inside the case.

The drop down panel below opens to expose all sorts of connections. Not only do you have tons of front USB ports but you also have Firewire, Front Panel Audio (3.5mm), and a built in Multi Card Reader.

Assembly was a breeze as the case supports mATX and ATX motherboards and comes with enough stand-offs to set up either size motherboard. There is one 120mm silent intake fan (and another can be mounted on the opposite side of the case) and there are dual 80mm silent exhaust fans. The top of the case is vented much like a receiver and has lots of ventilation directly above the CPU.

The internal drive bay is an interesting design and can house at least 6 hard drives plus your optical drive.  All the drives install into the drive bay which then lowers into place and is screwed in. This design allows for easy servicing as you can simply remove all the drives in one fail swoop, when you need to work on the Mother Board.

My Dual Core 2.66Ghz machine is running an OEM style aluminum/copper passive heat sink with arctic silver thermal paste, in addition to an Nvidia 9600GSO PCIe vid card running a mild overclock. The system runs at 39C at both cores at 20-30% load and the hard drives run at 34C under the same load.

I would recommend this case to anyone looking to build a great looking HTPC on a budget but without sacrificing looks or quality or functionality.