SILVERSTONE Black GRANDIA GD04B Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

Comment:
The front panel is gorgeous, very thick aluminum, very well anodized. The rest of the case is okay, but not amazing - there are some quality control issues with paint coverage (unequal on the two halves of the top cover, overspray inside, ect), but they aren't dealbreakers to me.The layout inside is very interesting and seems quite well designed, there are several rubber attachments to prevent vibrating things (like the hard drive, or the optical drive) from transferring the vibration to the whole case. There is a baffle on the side of the hard drive mount made of perforated rubber - it is designed to force air in to the main chamber area from the left side intake fan. It was attached to the hard drive mount with a little bit of glue, most of which was dry by the time it reached me, I would have much preferred rubber pushpins or something similar.The stock fans are fantastic when using the included adapter, which I believe runs them at 7v, they are quieter with the case open than my current case closed. They seem to move a decent amount of air, too, more than enough to keep my i3 cool. I'm not so keen about the dust filters being on the inside of the case, I would much prefer to be able to run a vacuum along the outside of the case once a week to catch any dust.Be careful to get a short optical drive, both of mine protrude just above the stock CPU cooler, it took some creative cable management to make sure the CPU heatsink fan doesn't eat my SATA cable.

Comment:
This is a great case. Dont expect to be able to pack in a lot of hard drives. I have 1 hard drive in now, and I would be hard pressed to stick a second in there unless i started chopping excess leads off my new Corsair Power supply. A modular powersupply may be better option if going with multiple hard drives , just make sure to cross check the dimensions of one your going to buy first. This case does have some cable management features built in but there is so little room that you better be an absolute neat freak with your cable dressing to keep airflow in check. I have an 8800GT dual slot card in right now and no heat issues. Don't get me wrong, these aren't complaints regarding size. I knew this case was shallow , it was my reason for buying it. I do have to say that I was quite surprised and how packed and compressed everything is in there though. Its the only case that would fit in my new home entertainment unit. I am very happy with this case. It has excellent build quality I expect from silverstone. ALSO 1 added little bonus I discovered! Its hard to tell because its kind of camoflauged against all the other steel parts of the case in the pics on NCIX here, but there is actually an expansion slot bracket placed horizontally above the PSU for some mother boards that come with onboard devices that have a header on the motherboard and require a bracket to placed in your cases frame occupying a pci slot... ie a serial port or in my situation an S/PDIF ports.