Sunbeamtech Acrylic HTPC Case Review

The Acrylic HTPC Case from Sunbeamtech

On the pictures below you can have an overall look from this case after it has been assembled. It comes with four 80 mm fans that glow blue when they are turned on. Two are installed on the front panel, cooling down the hard disk drives, one is installed on the middle of the case and can be moved around, so you can decide where is the best position for this fan to be depending on the components you have inside your PC, and another one is installed on the rear panel.

You have to pay close attention when building your case in order to install the fans on their correct positions (correct direction of airflow). All fans must be blowing air from the front of the case to the rear of the case. If you invert any of them you may face an overheating situation. The fans included with this case blow air from their “open side” to the side that has some plastic supports holding the fan frame to the center of the fan. So all fans must be installed with side that has these supports facing the rear of the case.

All fans use a three-pin connector (coming with 4-pin adapters), so you can connect them on your motherboard to monitor their speed.

Figure 4: Sunbeamtech acrylic HTPC case.

Figure 5: Sunbeamtech acrylic HTPC case.

As you can see this case is big enough to hold ATX motherboards. Several HTPC cases in order to be smaller can only hold microATX boards.

The panel with the audio jacks and USB ports can be seen in Figure 6. The two USB ports are too close to each other, preventing you from installing two “fat” USB devices at the same time there.

This case doesn’t come with a memory card reader, feature commonly found on HTPC cases. On the other hand, this makes this case to be cheaper than other HTPC solutions.

Figure 6: Front panel.

Finally in Figure 7 we have the rear panel. No mystery here: you can see the rear 80 mm fan and the seven slots.

Figure 7: Rear panel.