Antec's Fusion 430 HTPC case is explored and used to build a full system. Then various parameters are measured to assess the case's functionality when it is use for different HTPC functions.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/0 [...] index.html

Why are all of the temps in Fahrenheit instead of the usual Celsius? I have never read a hardware review where the temps weren't in Celsius. Not a big deal, it just makes it pretty much unreadable (without looking up conversions) for the majority of the world.

Damn that stereo stand has NO ventilation at all.....

"Antec's" power supply calculator is the Extreme PSU calc talked about all over the forum.

It is well known to over rate(since this covers them....)

Its shows over 100 watts too much for my Athlon64(3200+ system that takes about 125 watts from the wall...so the DC load is even lower...) system....

I get 496 for my system with no cap aging 85% TDP and 90percent load

My ups shows me at about 374(2 x F@H SMP(2 cores each) + Ati tool[By new benchmark for power waste, a good 20-30 watts more them any game] + defrag on 2 drives)

I think you would be surprised at how much that psu can run(even 24/7)....

If this is your new HTPC, Under volt the cpu a bit to drop(i got my A64 from 1.55 to 1.4...) the temps. And also a Zalman CNPS7000 or 7700 should fit the case(and when controlled with speedfan can be dead silent...)....

Its good to see a new article....I have looked at that case myself(because its nice and small...)

430watts should be plenty for a NON-gaming system.

A real good test would be to get a watt meter and measure how much the system really draws at the wall.

And whats with the sudden change in temps? the whole industry uses Celsius.

Suggestion to edit the article and convert over.

I'd build an HTPC for gaming. With HTPC you get rid of the DVD player and TiVO box, you'd might as well get rid of the gaming console too.

friggen freaks trying to eliminate games from HTPC are among those who have essentially kept HTPC from becoming popular.

you can run games on a 430 watt psu....hell the 6750/8800GT would be no problem at all...

Could ya PLEASE do an ATI HDMI based HTPC sometime soon? I don't understand how tech sites keep overlooking HDMI. I would think a one cable solution would beat the mess of wires ya got there.

Did they really use onboard graphics for a HTPC? How is that supposed to produce a great picture??? Also, why did they use onboard sound? And a 939 board? I could understand if that board is what they had lying around but to measure the quality of heat dissapation, they should have used a hd2600 or something and a creative labs sound card.

I agree. I sold my old PS2 after not touching it for over a year, and I can't really justify to myself paying $500 for a PS3 I wouldn't play much. All gaming is done on my PC now. I'm also working on turning my wife's into an HTPC and you can bet I'll be playing some games on it then also. I don't care if it gets a little loud during gaming because the stereo will be cranked! Gunfire and bombs sound awesome when the house is shaking and neighbors are taking cover!

Looks like Antec is improving the HTPC offerings - and while Silverstone is still the Rolls Royce of HTPC cases, some viable competition might shake their prices a bit lower.

I work in a small store putting together all kinds of computers. I've worked both with Silverstone cases and the Antec Fusion and have to say that I like the Fusion a bit more although the Silverstone had much more hardware based potential because of the non-cabin based design, you could install at least 5 HDD and a ATX-sized motherboard.

About the Antec Fusion, 430W with 32A on the 12V rail is MUCH MORE than enough, even for gaming! You have to look at the fact that you won't be able to install more than 2 HDD, 1 Optical drive, no extra fans and so forth. Although I haven't tried installing a fullsized, dual-slot GPU like 8800GTS (or GTX for that matter, I hardly doubt it would fit ) the PSU isn't what would be stopping it, it would be the size of it.

And with those cases as with every other one, when you put together lots of them you learn new and new ways to hide the cables, although it doesn't have idiot-proof cable-management there are lots of places where you can hide the wiring and do that much more effectivly than we see on your photos

But non-the-less, it's a good article for those who are looking to buy a HTPC, but I can't agree with you about the shortcomings of the PSU and the Tri-Cool fans.

I have no problems running a 85W AthlonX2 with a 3780 a raptor, soundcard, and two optical drives off my Antec 430 Truepower power supply. You would be well advised to stop overstating PSU requirements. The rest of the industy is catching on, when will Tomshardware.

Hey, I'd put a high load on that power supply, but I'm not going to argue with someone who wants more. I prefer the Antec Fusion over most others because it's among the smallest to provide for full-sized cards.

There are a few similarly sized cases that offer the same options.

The reason for using a Socket 939 mobo and older parts was clearly stated on page 6, Jedi940:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/0 [...] page6.html

Good points about the PSU by everyone but l was being cautious. Notice I did say 30% aging on the capacitors. Also this is not a Truepower eventhough it is close. For a strictly HTPC the PSU should work fine. I would only like the Tri-cool fans to be quieter on higher settings other than that they are great. As I said in the article it was a pleasure to work with this case and I would recommend it to many but it would be even cooler if they had a 7" touch screen model like some of the really high end HTPC cases but again they are not sub $200 cases : )

I've had this case for a couple of months now (Fusion 430, Silver) and must admit it's the best change to my HTPC in a while. I'm running it with an Abit uATX board based on the nVidia 630a/7050PV chip with onboard HDMI. I soon found that insufficient to for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, so a MSI 8600GTS Diamond Plus video card was dropped in soon after (also has HDMI). The power supply has no problems at all with all of this.

I'm running the CPU on a passive cooler (Thermaltake SI-128, it fits) and the video card has also had the cooler replaced with a passive unit from Thermaltake. The idea of just running case fans is a little frightening at first, especially in the Australian summer heat, but it coped fine even with the TriCools at low speed.

There's been a bit of talk about the PSU; it's an Antec Earthwatts 430W. The specs are on their site.

The VFD on the silver unit is an iMON unit, like just about every other HTPC case out there. The software distributed by Antec allows it to understand the Microsoft MCE remote codes; almost. If you press a number key when searching the HTPC receives the number, and not letters and numbers SMS style. Works fine with the Ricavision Sideshow remotes also.

The short comings I found are minor:

1) TriCool fans; Antec, seriously, what's the point of a speed control on the inside of the case? It's a HTPC case... typically in a hifi cabinet of sorts and not as easy to access as a PC case might be. This was fixed by replacing them with two normal, good quality, 120mm fans, and connecting them to the MB's CPU and System fan headers (3 pin) and setting the BIOS to control them. When idling, they're pretty much off, and crank up as needed. The only time they get loud, the movies are cranking and louder.

2) Both sata power connections from the PSU are on the same cable. The HDD and ODD are in two different locations so they don't reach. If you're enthusiastic about your HTPC you'll be looking at HD-DVD and BD; and all newer ODD's these days are (finally) SATA. This one is overcome with a molex to SATA connector, or by finding a drive that has both old and new power feeds. That won't last forever.

3) I'm surprised the power LED wasn't mentioned in the review. It's white (at least it is on the silver case) which looks classy, but it's extremely bright. Watching a movie in a dark room makes the room glow as if by moonlight. That you get used to. The hard disk light flashing periodically, similarly white and bright, is more irritating. Disconnecting it from the motherboard solves that.

The only thing missing now is a single HD-DVD and BD drive, such as LG's, at a reasonable price. At the moment I'm getting by with a Pioneer BD-ROM drive internally (no BD-RW) and an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive. Ugly, but the cheapest solution until there's hybrid drives I think.

Couldn't recommend the case enough. It single handedly dropped the PC's noise level more than any other thing I've tried. It's also doesn't look cheap (no plastic).

I'll not build an HTPC / MMPC until I find case with multiple (2 min, preferably 4) exterior Hard Drives on the front panel. An internal HD (twin HD cage in case ya wanted RAID) for the OS and programs and exterior hot swappable HD's for content. This box allows two HD's ....not exactly a lotta room for an serious MM collection. Even storing music as SHN files will eat that up very fast.

Or, seems some enterprising vendor would match their front panel design to say an exterior HD enclosure or NAS like the Infant / Netgear NV+ which holds 4 hot swappable drives.

http://infrant.com/products/produc [...] S%20NVPlus

Or the external HotSwap systems like from Granite Digital

http://www.granitedigital.com/inde [...] ategory=47

Or come up with something of their own.

IMO HTPC's should never have more than one drive (ssd preferably)... you put your large data arrays somewhere ELSE. I've got two HTPC's, Silverstones, very quiet P/S's (Seasonic - quietest available at the time these systems were built... these days I'd go passive), Zalman CPU coolers, passive cooled video cards, Audigy, DVD, one HDD and gigabit ethernet to my multi-terrabyte file servers (loud, power hungry, fast, and most importantly - IN A DIFFERENT ROOM). The idea is to keep the noise somewhere else, which means mid-power processors (instead of power hungry extreme editions), passive cooling wherever possible, and minimizing component load (especially noise generating components).

Both systems are about as loud as my PS3 (a LOT quieter than the 360).

I gotta disagree....I don't want to be building multiple hard drive towers or walking all over the house to "swap HD's" Even forgetting movies, let's say I was ever to reach my goal of having a copy of every dead show ever played. There's something like 2,674 shows. Figure at about 2 Gigs per show (many are longer) in lossless format. With about 465 Gigs of space on a 500 GB drive, I can get 233 shows on a drive....that's 12 drives....just for my GD fixation, then there's the released material, my other musical interests, my wife's, my 3 kids, and that new fangled "HD video" stuff.

Yes, that's probably one far "end" of the spectrum on the music side but a HD video collector, can eat up 25 or more gigs a pop. 18 movies and you're done with a 500 GB drive. So you can start building huge towers or ya can just use hot swappable drives. If you want to start building server racks with 8 - 12 15k SCSI HD's, by all means , hide those out in the garage or something. But regular SATA hot swappable drives let you have the same capacity w/o all the size, noise, ugliness and heat.

For simple HT and MM delivery, we don't need 15k rpm SCSI drives, we can use quiet, thermally efficient modern SATA drives. I have an Infrant NV+ about 3 feet from my head and I can't hear a thing. I put my head against the fan.....while it gives my ear a little chill, I don't hear anything. I can hear my laptop tho. A single 120mm fan on a very low, non audible speed is certainly enough to cool 4 hard drives in a properly designed case.

The problem with most HTPC equipment is that manufacturer's design their units to account for consumer's propensity to install such equipment in tight unventilated spaces. A properly designed cabinet, will go along way towards eliminating noise and in all likelihood keep fans from ever being called to turn on or at worst on at low speed.