Moving onwards, the chassis itself. Pretty nice design, nice slimline .. roughly 5cm in height. One subtle item I dislike, the chrome vertical line. I think the design would have been a notch nicer if it where to be completely black. measurements are 430 x 310 x 53mm. To the left you can spot the location for a slide-in slimline DVD-ROM should you want to install one. In the middle, de-activated right now, we spot the VFD display with below it 6 external function buttons.

If you look on the upper side and right side of the chassis panel, you'll notice a lot of meshes, cooling is an important issue for small HTPC that need to crunch a lot of work. This is very good to see implemented in such a manner.

Once you open the right side bezel door we see additional connectivity, yet more importantly the memory card readers for SD Card, MultiMediaCard, CompactFlash, MicroDrive, Memory Stick, Smart Media.

The back panel sports all the usual motherboard inputs and outputs as well as necessities such as HDMI, VGA and audio outputs along with more USB connectivity and an Ethernet (10/100 Fast Ethernet Realtek) port. For your reference, the HDMI connector supports HDCP.

All the way to you right the open slot is actually an extension slot. This requires a riser card which is not supplied with the kit. You could use that riser card for a TV tuner card or high-end soundcard. What I would have liked to see here was an optical TOSLINK output for audio. other than that this is fine really.

Let's open up the chassis and see what's inside. This can be easily done by removing two screws on each side panel, lift up the back and slide it gently opens it up quickly.