Streacom F7C EVO HTPC Chassis Review

Build time for the system was about 15 minutes, quick and pain-free thanks to the easily accessible mounts and minimal cable requirements. You can see the PSU cable has been fitted on the left, running directly to the 24pin connection on the motherboard, while the small PCB attached to the back of the 24pin plug has the white connection that feels cables to the motherboard, the two SATA connections and the single molex 4pin.

With the hard drive deck back in place you can see I’ve chosen to mount out 520GB SSD on the top and our Akasa CPU cooler has more than enough room to breath. There is no GPU in this rig, but the i2500K should be more than enough for most HTPC needs, although it would maybe benefit from an APU configuration also.

There is room for a half width PCI card, so long as you can find something low profile with a half width back plate, you could still get a GPU in here and the chassis does feature side ventilation that would allow any expansion card to draw extra air.

Cable management is non-existent really, but because all the required cables are fairly light weight and the only moving part here is out CPU cooler, I don’t think we’re going to have any issues. I was still able to keep all the cables out of the way but you could no doubt whip that into better shape with some cable ties if you really felt the need, but I doubt it requires it.

With the cover back in place it’s impossible to see anything that we’ve installed, short of putting your eye to the air vents at least. Here you can see I’ve tucked it between my Xbox and PlayStation 3 to give you a little size comparison. It’s just the perfect size to sit snug on the TV stand and it doesn’t look out of place with the black glass and aluminum finish of the other devices and the stand.