Antec's Fusion PC enclosure for quiet, cool media centre PCs
With PCs becoming more powerful and finding their way into consumer electronics and entertainment, keeping it cool and quiet is a priority. After all, you don’t want your movies and music to be drowned out by the fans on your PC.
Antec have come up with a solution if you’re running a PC based on Micro ATX form factor motherboards (so they say – I’ll take their word for it). The case features a triple chamber layout for separately housing the power supply, hard drives and motherboard. The motherboard chamber features dual three-speed adjustable 120mm TriCool fans. Silence is further obtained by using extra soft silicone grommets on the removable hard disc drive brackets to minimise vibrations.
Antec supply their own custom PSU featuring an 80mm fan and universal input with active Power Factor Correction. There’s also four expansion slots and three drive bays (1 5.25″ and 2 3.5″ internals) so that adding extra storage and drives is easy.
Front connection options comprise of 2 USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, and audio connectors, plus a nice big volume control mounted on the aluminium front plate. There’s a Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) that lists basic info about volume, CD track, etc.
The other advantage of casing up your media PC in this way is that it starts to look more like part of your AV entertainment setup rather than a boring box. Unless you really like the design of your PC case, this is an elegant solution that not only should improve the reliability of your system, but integrates it too. It does look good. The case is extremely reliable and durable due to its 0.8mm cold rolled steel construction.
Of course it depends on you wanting to run your own media PC based on the layout this casing requires. Price will depend on the features chosen.
Antec UK
