SunBeamtech Acrylic HTPC chassis review - Introduction

Face it, 50% of us Gurus really do like pimped PCs, shiny, bling, heck .. the Feng Shui attitude of, for example, UV lighting in a PC. Therefore it is often used by many of us. Some hate it, some love it .. I'm still in that stage where I am fascinated by that radiating light effect. And so do others, as complete spraypainted PCs, acrylic PC cases, modded cased have been build and based from often merely a simple idea .. a figure, a color, material .. and lighting..

Some take it a step further... acrylic material. A relative cheap to purchase item and when properly built by a chassis manufacturer, very interesting material for the end user. An even better fun fact is that Plexiglas can be made UV reflective and when you combine all these properties nicely together the end results of building a UV reflective chassis can be breath-taking, astonishing really.

It's a challenge though, the chassis needs to fit the purpose and the reality is... when you use transparent acrylic with UV coating... you'll see every and any wire, component, peripheral inside that chassis. So this is not for everybody.

A couple of weeks ago the guys from Sunbeamtech released a HTPC based on such a design, and asked us to review it. Assembling these chassis' is a lot of work so I did at first hesitate. But then when I looked at the specs, I could not resist. A fully functional HTPC chassis, with proper cooling, front panel, UV lit fans all at a very sharp price of just 79 USD. Sunbeamtech offers their Acrylic HTPC case in two versions: a clear non-UV reagent acrylic (HTPC-T) or using a blue UV-reagent acrylic (HTPC-HUVB), the model we reviewed.

So while a chassis like this is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to assemble, both chassis and components wise .. the end-result  .. ah just have a look at that photo below and then head on off to the next page where I'll show you the assembly of this chassis.