silverstone-lc16m-case-review

Silverstone LC16M Case Review

Friday, 20 March 2009 12:29 In this article, Fusion NET will be looking at Media PC’s and providing an in-depth look at how to build a hi-spec machine at a lower cost. The article will compare pre-built, brand named products, to that of a custom built solution. As a foundation for the article, we will be using SilverStone Technology’s LC16M case, as well as various products from their product range.

With today’s growing capacity for data storage, increased ISP downstream, and advances in multimedia PC technology, the demand for a single serving multimedia platform has increased significantly within the past few years. Many consumers are now aware that PC’s can do pretty much anything, whether that may be television, radio, music, film or communication. The expansion of content on the Internet and more affordable high-speed ISP solutions has significantly aided the growth and accessibility of entertainment within the home. Consumers are unlikely to use their PC’s as part of their living room entertainment system, as most PC’s are unsightly and noisy. Therefore, buyers tend to opt for alternative products, such as Hard Drive Recorders, DVD Recorders and DVD Players. However, these products are often limited in functionality and built to perform specific tasks. With the introduction of the Media PC, consumers are now able to enjoy the functionality of their PC, whilst introducing an aesthetically pleasing look and relatively quite solution to their living room. Media PC’s are essentially your standard PC but come with reduced specifications and are incorporated with IR remote hardware and a user-friendly software interface. Media PC’s can get away with lower specifications as their main purpose is to display multimedia content. This means that most Media PC’s can be incorporated with quieter cooling solutions, such as reduced airflow fans or even water cooling. Most of the big named manufacturers have introduced their own pre-built versions of Media PC’s, which are available at a price tag of around £1000 (excluding display). This price will usually get you a P4 3.0Ghz machine with TV tuner, 250GB Hard Drive, CD Rom Drive and 512MB of RAM. In essence, this hardware configuration would be quite cheap to reproduce. However, manufactures tend to get away with charging high retail costs, which is partly due to the aesthetic looks of their product, as well as the software they use. In fact, most manufacturers tend to use Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Centre Edition, which is simply Windows XP Pro SP2 with a few additional add-ons. In the next section of this article, we will be looking at how to build your own Media PC, whilst incorporating greater specifications, better looks and providing it all at a slightly cheaper price tag. SPECIFICATIONS For the purpose of this article, we will be building a Media PC from scratch. The following price list and specifications include details for the base system only and are inclusive of display and input devices.

SilverStone LC16M Case (£181.85 Including VAT).
SilverStone NT02 CPU Heatsink and Fan (£34.65 Including VAT).
AMD Athlon 64 3500 / Asus A8N-SLI SE nForce 4 SLi / 1GB GeIL PC3200 Dual Channel Kit Bundle (£291.22 Including VAT).
XFX GeForce PCX6600 GT Extreme Gamers Edition 128MB DDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI PCI-Express (£105.69 Including VAT).
2x Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 11 400GB ATA-133 16MB Cache (£314.78 Including VAT).
Sony 16x16 DVDRW Dual Layer ReWriter (£39.89 Including VAT).
Hauppauge WinTV NOVA-PCI-T – DVB (£79.49 Including VAT)

Total = £1047.57 (Including VAT). At a total sum of £1047.57, the benefits of building your own Media PC are perhaps not apparent. In fact, you are getting a lot more for your money, particularly where disk space and computing power come in to the picture. A rough equivalent of a pre-built machine would get you a 250GB drive, 512 RAM and a P4 3.0 GHz CPU. For those who are trying to lower their costs could effectively save a few hundred by downgrading the Hard Disk space, RAM and CPU power. THE CASE The LC16M comes from SilverStone’s range of Lascala Home Theatre PC (HTPC) cases. SilverStone’s experience in design of HTPC desktop cases is clear through looking at their extensive product range. Starting from their first LC01 case, SilverStone has appeared to make steady progress in introducing a sense of style, as well as functionality, which make its cases an appealing product for use within a home entertainment environment. The sort of styling that SilverStone have introduced into their Lascala range has perhaps put pressure on other case manufacturers to come up with rival designs.

The LC16M is an elegantly designed case with subtle features. It introduces a non-complicated look with the sort of functionality, which makes this case compelling in its own way. The exterior of the case has a polished, brushed metal design, which is available in either silver or black. The front panel is comprised mostly of aluminium, with simplistic looking controls for multimedia and system functionality. SilverStone have tried to keep with a consistent design throughout the case by incorporating solid metal flaps at the front of the case, which hide the DVD drive bay and front panel inputs. After being fully loaded, from just lifting the case you can tell that SilverStone has left no expense spared in the materials used, as quite simply put, the case weighs a ton! Probably one of the most impressive features of the case design is the front panel LED display with inbuilt IR remote receiver. This allows you to get full use out of your multimedia PC and will display information direct from the OS, as well as provide full remote control to supported applications. We will obviously come back to this in more detail a little later in the article.

Interior The interior of the case is made up of the same strong metal material, which is consistent throughout the design. Obviously, the internal metals do not consist of the same brushed metal effects as seen on the exterior. The interior features a sturdy design with all the drive bays screwed and locked into position. The hard drive bays are positioned to the left and right of the DVD drive slot and VFD/IR panel. These hard drive bays are removable and interchangeable between either side of the DVD drive slot. They can also hold up to three hard drives each, providing a massive storage capacity of six Hard Drives within the system. SilverStone have given you the option to mount 120mm case fans to each of the drive bays at the front of the case, providing constant airflow to the hard drives. These front fans also allow you to provide airflow to the back of the case by drawing in cool air from the forward intake vents. These vents are based at the bottom of the unit. Four rubber base foot stands allow the unit to be raised about a centimetre from the surface, allowing for good airflow around the entire exterior of the case. The two 80mm rear fans expel hot air carried through from the front. SilverStone has also intelligently positioned a mesh vent near the CPU, which allows for increased expulsion of hot air. Each of the drive bay units is fixed and screwed into place. We found removing and manoeuvring these bays around a little tricky, especially once all the core components were installed. The PSU, which is unconventionally placed at the opposite end of the system, causes great difficulty when removing a drive bay that has installed hard drives. The positioning of the PSU also made it difficult to connect certain motherboard cables, particularly the P4 power cable, which had to be stretched to the opposite side of the system. The DVD drive bay was also difficult to manoeuvre and came very close to the graphics card. In fact, the LC16M case does not support GeForce 6800/7800 and ATI x1800/x1900 graphics cards. Once all our components were installed we found working in the case quite difficult. The amount of cables from the Power Supply Unit alone created some restriction and airflow problems. However, we found that through careful sorting and positioning of components, we were able to store many of the cables in the front compartments of the case. This allowed for more room around the mainboard and better circulation. Because of these restriction problems, we would advise users to use a maximum of three or four drives, as supposed to the advertised six. Cooling SilverStone have managed to keep noise levels within the case to a minimum by incorporating more fans, rather than opting for a single higher-powered fan. The two 80mm case fans at the rear provide a combined power of 2050rpm, allowing for a relatively silent noise level of 21dBA. The thick metal exterior also allows for greater sound absorption.

The two SilverStone FN91 120mm fans at the front of the case, which are not a standard feature of the package, provide cool airflow to the hard drive bays at a quite operational speed of 2100rpm. These fans provide an airflow of 36.89 CFM and run at a noise level of 26dBA.

The decision to go for a lower performance graphics card, the PCX6600 GT Extreme Gamers Edition, was made as part of a conscious effort to keep noise levels to a minimum. Most higher-spec graphics cards favour a dual-slot fan design, which are often noisier and expel greater amounts of heat. The 6600GT comes equipped with 128MB’s of DDR3 memory, dual DVI and TV-Out, making it the ideal choice for our Media PC. The 6600GT can even cope with a number of top PC game titles, as well as perform favourably well in Half-Life 2, CS: Source and Far Cry. As part of our CPU cooling solution, we opted to use SilverStone’s NT02 CPU cooler. This is a large hybrid heatsink cooler that utilizes both copper and aluminium materials. The base of the cooler is made up of a flat copper surface, which rests on the top of the CPU. The first layer is constructed of a thick aluminium plate, which has protruding vertically positioned aluminium fins. An additional set of copper fins has then been placed on top of the aluminium structure. Finally, a thick black aluminium heatsink has been wrapping around 50% of the structure, allowing for a 92mm fan to be attached on either side of the heatsink.

The cooler includes bracket support for P4 Socket 478, LGA775, AMD Socket 754, 939 and 940 CPU’s. The heatsink itself is one of the largest CPU coolers on the market and weighing in at 880g’s it is also one of the heaviest. However, whilst those dull little Intel chips may not be able to cope with the weight of this mighty cooler, our AMD chip managed just fine. The installation of the NT02 on a socket 939 motherboard is a simple one and involves positioning the cooler over the CPU and fastening in two screws.

With the addition of the NT02’s 92mm fan, which operates at a maximum noise level of 40.4dBA, the NT02 happens to be the loudest thing in our Media PC. Thankfully, SilverStone has included a 3.5” aluminium fan controller, which enables you to set the fan speed down from 3800RPM to just 1800RPM, providing a much quieter operation level of just 17.0dBA.

During our hard drive tests the LC16M case managed to keep our two 400GB IDE hard drives at a cool 26 degrees Celsius. These temperatures were only slightly raised to 28 degrees Celsius during high load. Our CPU temperatures were equally impressive, giving an idle temperature of just 30 degrees Celsius, which rose to 35 degrees during high load. It is clear that the cooling performance of the NT02 CPU cooler, as well as the efficient airflow design of the LC16M case, performs well in keeping the HTPC system cool at all times. Overall, the SilverStone LC16M case provides a relatively quite and efficient cooling solution, which makes it more of an appealing product for home entertainment use. Front Controls The front controls consist of seven multimedia buttons and one function knob. The multimedia controls include, skip back, skip forward, stop, pause/play, mute, volume up and volume down. The function knob incorporates a turn and click function, which allows you to control various multimedia features, as well as volume control. These controls connect internally via the USB ports on your mainboard. The Asus A8N-SLi SE has ten USB 2.0 ports in total making it a perfect choice for this type of case.

Whilst the front panel controls are an excellent addition to this case, they only work after the correct software and drivers have been installed. The front flap at the base of the VFD display opens to reveal connections for four USB 2.0 devices, as well as headphone jack, microphone jack and FireWire. Unfortunately, the Asus A8N-SLi SE version does not include a FireWire port. However, their Deluxe and Premium versions of this board do. Users may also want to consider using a Creative audio card with FireWire port built in, or perhaps an add-in FireWire PCI Card. VFD/IR The in-built VFD with IR receiver is probably the most substantial aspect of this case. The VFD unit, coupled with the iMedian software, can be set to show various information, including system usage statistics, live weather reports, news and multimedia information. The VFD unit also has inbuilt memory, which allows you to set your own custom message and have it displayed whilst the system is off. Additionally, you can also program a time for your system to shut down and boot, as well as an alarm setting. At first, we had some trouble getting the VFD unit to work, but after the correct software and driver updates, we were soon able to enjoy the full functionality of this case. The included IR remote control includes all the features of your standard Media PC control, including multimedia functions, system functions, mouse control and keyboard control. We found the mouse control to be somewhat slow and difficult to manoeuvre. The graphic on the media button was also quite ugly and did not seem to fit in with the aesthetics of the rest of the remote. The VFD/IR module and iMedian software is not an exclusive product to SilverStone and can be found in many other Media PC cases. The package is also available for purchase as a 5.2” drive bay, which will fit in any standard PC case. However, SilverStone have appeared to do a good job at making the VFD/IR module their own and this is apparent at how seamlessly integrated the system fits in with their design. SOFTWARE SilverStones LC16M case comes included with the iMedian software package, which is a complete Media PC solution intended to provide an alternative to Microsoft’s Media Center Edition 2005. The software provides all the features you would expect to find in a Media PC software package, including support for TV viewing and recording, Internet browsing, network media access, picture viewer and video playback. The software does not require much setup and is relatively easy to navigate. Whilst iMedian does have all the functionality of Windows Media Center Edition, it lacks a certain panache. Its menu system has very basic animation and its folder structure closely resembles that of an operating system. Luckily, the iMedian software is supported under Windows Media Center Edition, enabling you to get the sort of styling that most users would come to expect from a home entertainment system. One positive aspect we did find about iMedian is it did not require installation of any third party codecs, such as XVID, DivX and AC3, whilst Windows Media Center Edition does!

CONCLUSION SilverStone’s Lascala range of HTPC cases has introduced a new breed of styling to Media PC systems. The LC16M’s sense of styling manages to surpass that of most pre-built Media PC systems on the market, providing a true contender to the available brand named products in retail stores. Consumers are now aware that it is often cheaper to manufacturer their own Media PC and SilverStone have helped to provide an affordable and practical solution to do this. With the introduction of the LC16M, SilverStone have once again proven that PC systems deserve a place next to your home entertainment hi-fi system. Fusion NET is going to award the LC16M with a score of 4.5 out of 5. PROS