by Vasily Melnik
06/20/2006 | 10:51 AM
We’ve recently been paying a lot of our attention to using the PC as a multimedia entertainment center and we would be wrong to do otherwise since this is one rapidly developing sector of today’s computer industry.
We have tested many HTPC system cases from a number of popular brands, but they all share a common drawback: intended for standard hardware components, they are too big, unfortunately. So, a natural question to ask is “Can they make something like that, but smaller?” The multimedia PC is usually not a single PC in a household and you don’t install top-end graphics cards and a few add-on controllers into it, yet it is desirable that it allowed using full-size mainboards, power supplies and drives to make it easier for the potential customer to pick up the components.
The attempts to implement the HTPC concept in a thin case like those of today’s DVD players are hardly usable. They are usually equipped with notebook-oriented optical drives and a rather noisy CPU cooler. The latter fact is understandable. Considering the use of low-profile heatsinks, there’s no talking about low-speed fans until mobile CPUs come to this area. But the concept of HTPC solutions implies a total lack of noise because who would ever bear to hear the incessant humming of the cooling system fans in the pauses between the songs or even as the background of quiet music compositions? Moreover, it would be odd to get a noisy system for $800, which is the bottom price for ready-made multimedia PCs.
So, we need a compact system case that permits to use standard hardware components and features a clever design and ergonomics. Our long wait for a system case that would meet these requirements has finally been rewarded. It’s not ideal, but very close to that, and you can even make into the ideal system case with your own hands as will be described below.
Cooler Master Media 260 is the number one pretender to the title of the best case for building a HTPC system using standard parts. Learn more about it in this review!
The case is shipped in a plain gray box with a Cooler Master logotype, which looks rather too small for a box with a product from such a famous brand. The box lacks a handle, so you may find it inconvenient to carry it to your home in your hands: it is not very heavy, but it doesn’t fit in under your arm.
The box contains one of the most harmoniously designed HTPC cases:
The front panel is laconic, bearing just the really necessary things. The tray of the optical drive is on the right. The remote control’s sensor is below it.
A display is in the middle of the front panel:
The display itself is smaller than it seems:
The plastic piece that makes it visually larger is just an element of design (and of a very good design, I should say). Interface connectors and controls are hidden under a cover on the left:
We’ve got two USB 2.0 ports here, headphones and microphone sockets, and a FireWire port. The Power and Reset buttons are made of chromium-like plastic and match the overall design of the case perfectly:
What surprised me a little was the cover lock. It uses a strong magnet, but there is no handle or jut to make it easier to open the panel.
You have to use the small slits on the side:
That’s not very convenient. On the other hand, the system can be normally managed (particularly, turned on and off) from the remote control, so you won’t need to open that cover up too often.
The case itself seems to be a big ventilation grid:
It’s only the bottom and back panels, and part of the top one, which are blank. This approach ensures good cooling of the components, but doesn’t help at all to suppress the noise from the fans, making the user be more careful when choosing a CPU cooler for this system.
There seems to be nothing particularly interesting about the back panel.
Yet I found a couple of curious design solutions. First, there are a few openings here:
Judging by the diameter of the holes, they are meant for RCA connectors. It’s up to the manufacturer (or user) who’s assembling a computer in this system case if these are going to be sound or, for example, component video output. And there are also two brackets above the mainboard’s back connectors:
These are shaped like typical SCART connectors some users may ask for. I don’t know an add-on card that would support output via SCART, but there are a lot of adapters from typical PC interfaces to SCART which you can hide somewhere inside the case. As for expansion cards, the back panel seems to provide place for three of them:
But when it comes to practice, it’s not so clear. Let’s find out what are the basic assembly tips.
You realize this as soon as you remove the top panel:
That’s a curious internal design for you. Even if you’ve already dealt with HTPCs and think yourself experienced, you should still browse through the manual – this is going to save you a lot of time. The case must be dismantled before you start assembling a computer in it. You don’t have to take out too many things – first remove the panel with the exhaust fans:
The two low-speed, low-profiled fans are powered via an ordinary Molex for some reason. To avoid creating a mess of cables inside the case, I advise you to get rid of this connection at once and re-solder both the fans to one standard 3-pin connector, attaching it to the mainboard. Just don’t forget that you don’t have to connect the wires of the rotation speed sensors – you can do with one only and cut the other off completely (it’s enough to control the speed of only one of them since the fans are identical). The fans panel removed, you can next take out the cardboard box with accessories.
There are just a few items here. On top the heap there is a power adapter which supplies +5V standby voltage to the display in standby mode.
For example, you cannot turn the computer on from the remote control without this adapter. But why is it so sloppily made? Do you really need such a huge adapter to take two wires from the power supply aside? So, my recommendation is again to cut this thing down to decent size. It only takes a few minutes to solder the wires directly to a PSU cable, but you’ll save quite an amount of space inside the case as the result. Considering there’s not much room in the Media 260, it is stupid to squander it for such weird adapters.
Next, there are two angle bars included:
They are meant for mounting the case into a standard stand for hi-fi equipment, if you need to. You get two manuals with your Media 260:
One manual describes how to assemble the system, the other is concerned with the setup options of the iMON software. Yes, this software and a remote control are included by default with Cooler Master’s Media 260:
I wrote about the capabilities of the iMON software earlier so I won’t dwell upon them now (for edtails see our article called Thermaltake Bach and Mozart HT PC Review). However, I’d like to say that Cooler Master made a right choice. This is one of the best available solutions to transform a PC into a multimedia center, and one of the most convenient if you are going to control your system remotely.
That’s all about the accessories, so let’s go on dismantling the case further. Well, the only thing left for me to do is to remove the holder for the expansion card riser which does double duty as a stiffness rib.
First you should remove the cap that covers the fastening screws.
The cap is held by only two screws and is merely a decorative element. Then you can take out of the stiffness rib itself:
This will take some time as it is secured with five screws. Once you’ve removed the rib, you will meet another surprise that you may be already familiar with if you read our reviews of Thermaltake’s Bach and Mozart cases:
This is how the manufacturer connects the display to the mainboard’s USB header. And my recommendation remains the same: cut the cable and solder it to a normal connector without any adapters and also shorten the cable to just the necessary length. But don’t forget to detach the cable from the card with the logic before soldering.
There are a few more things here asking for a knife and soldering iron. For example, here is an indecently long cable that connects the display controller card with the Power button:
You should definitely make it shorter. And here is yet another exhaust fan:
It won’t take long to remove this tangle of cables with two Molex plugs and replace it with a standard 3-pin fan connector. When these cutting preliminaries are over, you can begin to assemble your multimedia computer.
I decided to start out by mounting the power supply (not a good decision as you’ll learn shortly). It is fastened to a special U-shaped frame in the front of the case:
You have to take it out of the case and screw to the PSU. You can’t get it wrong: the frame can only be fastened in the “right” way or not fastened at all.
Then the whole arrangement is put back into the case and gets secured with a couple of screws.
It’s designed well: the power supply of this type (with a 120mm fan) doesn’t practically take part in heat transfer inside the case – the air is taken from below the case.
The hot air is exhausted through the right panel. You can use traditional power supplies too, but a good PSU with a big 120mm fan is a priori quieter than a same-wattage PSU with an 80mm fan. The noise factor being of highest importance here, the choice is obvious. It was when I tried to install the mainboard that I regretted my not having read the manual beforehand – when the power supply is already installed, a full-width mainboard just cannot fit into the case. So I had to take the PSU out and put the mainboard in first. There was almost no gap between them after the installation:
I took a micro-ATX rather than a full-ATX mainboard as a more practical option when it comes to laying down the cables.
Once the mainboard was snugly nestled in the case, I turned to drives, particularly to the DVD drive as the biggest of them. You need to pull out the cage to install it:
The operation is simple since the cage is fastened with just a single screw. Install the drive into it and put the cage back in place.
It’s the same thing with the hard drives:
Take the cage out (it is held by one screw, too), fasten the drive and put it back again.
The exhaust fan on the side panel didn’t feel at all comfortable after that, though:
It is in part blocked by the optical drive. You may want to use a “shortened” drive to avoid this problem – there are many such models available now. Otherwise you’ll have another source of noise, which is not welcome in a HTPC. Next I had to connect the interface cables and that was the second time I regretted my having not read the manual – the +5V standby voltage cable from the display is to be attached to the reverse side of the display controller card which is hidden under the optical drive. So I had to remove the drive again to do that.
So, you should definitely read the manual before trying to assemble a computer in this system case.
When all the interface cables are attached, you only have to put the PSU cable out using these two things:
The cable is attached in quite an ordinary way:
Then you put the protective ring on it…
…and fix it in the hole:
The second cable holder, if you need it, may be fastened under any of the top panel screws. As for expansion cards, the internal part of the holder seems to support a riser for PCI cards only.
The graphics card slot is off the holder, which is not a defect. Judging by the snapshot at the manufacturer’s website, the graphics card riser is a separate thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any risers among the accessories to the case. The Cooler Master Media 260 must be targeted at system integrators rather than at the retail market. It’s not a problem for an integrator to order or manufacture necessary risers while the ordinary user has to order them at the case supplier if he/she needs to install a discrete graphics card or PCI add-on cards. In this case, the manipulations with the cables are followed by putting back the stiffness rib and the panel with the exhaust fans:
There’s a fine mess of unused cables between the drives. If you are going to assemble your own computer in this system case, you may want to remove all the extra cables with a soldering iron. If you only need 3 Molex plugs, leave them (and one as a reserve), but remove all the rest. They are unnecessary and impede normal airflows inside the case. You can even go further and shorten the main cable from the power supply, but this is a job for experienced users who feel confident with the soldering iron and have a solid knowledge of what purpose each wire is.
After you’ve assembled the system, don’t be hasty to put the top panel down. Try turning the computer on without it to see if some strayed wire hasn’t got between a fan’s blades. This can particularly happen to the two exhaust coolers above the memory slots – there are so many different cables around them.
The technical characteristics of the case are listed in the following table:
That’s all about how you assemble a computer system in a Media 260 case. I’m going to test it now.
The system was tested as it was. That is, the speeds of the system fans were left default; the case was closed and fully assembled during the tests; an air conditioner maintained a constant ambient temperature. I took care to lay the cables and wires in the case in such a way that they wouldn’t hinder airflows. However, I used all the included adapters for the tests to be closer to life.
The following components were installed into the Cooler Master Media 260 system case:
The tested system case is obviously not meant for building top-end PC systems while this set of components is more than sufficient for any multimedia task, except playing modern 3D games. Considering the lack of a discrete graphics card, I tested the system in the following modes:
We used Intel Desktop Utilities to read the CPU and mainboard temperatures; the temperature of the hard drive was reported by HDD Thermometer.
The ambient temperature remained constant at 21°C throughout the tests.
The temperatures are read after they have fully stabilized.
So, here are the diagrams:
This is an impressive performance. The perforated panels of the Cooler Master Media 260 case ensure comfortable thermal conditions for all the components of the system. I only do not advise you to use the boxed cooler. It is near silent in idle mode, but produces an irritating noise under load. This problem can be solved easily as there are a lot of coolers that will readily fit into this system case and will give you perfect silence.
The Media 260 case allows using a full-size ATX mainboard, but you’d better prefer a micro-ATX one to save room for the cables (this is not a problem if you are going to do some manual work on removing extra cables).
The Cooler Master Media 260 is surely one of the best cases for HTPC systems I’ve seen that supports standard hardware components. This system case has a sure chance to become a bestseller in its market sector. And if the manufacturer becomes as generous as to include a riser for expansion cards into the package, its functionality will be far broader in comparison with the existing alternatives. You can order the riser cards at the supplier if you wish, at least the manufacturer’s website describes three types of them: AGP+PCI riser card (1xAGP, 2xPCI), PCI-E x16+PCI riser card (1xPCI-E x16, 1xPCI) and PCI-E x16+PCI riser card (1xPCI-E x16, 2xPCI). So, if you are looking for a case to build a HTPC in, you should definitely consider this one. It is worthy of a look.
P.S. And if you don’t like this model for some reason, visit the Cooler Master website which lists a few more interesting HTPC system cases we are ready to test in our labs at the first opportunity.