Author: Andrew Schembri Date: March 18, 2008 Manufacturer: Sunbeam Provider: Sunbeam

Thoughts » Page 1: Sunbeamtech Acrylic HTPC Case

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Sunbeam, well known for their fascination with acrylic and lights, shipped us their new Acrylic HTPC with, you guessed it, more lights! Building a case is serious business, especially when dealing with enthusiast hardware. Some of the design considerations include good cable management, good airflow with clean air, room for plenty of hard drives, quiet, and let’s not forget aesthetics! This is quite a large list! Let’s take a look at Sunbeam’s work at how they incorporated all of these considerations.


Specifications:

• 18.7” x 17.3” x 7.7” (L x W x H)
• 12.3 pounds
• Accepts standard ATX motherboards
• 2x 5.25” drive bay
• 1x 3.5” external bay
• 8x 3.5” internal bays
• Front I/O ports: 2x USB 2.0, speaker, microphone
• Color: Transparent or UV reactive blue

Assembly

Sunbeam chose to send the acrylic case completely unassembled. This makes for a small box, as well as possibly less of a shipping charge, more importantly, this way of packaging minimizes damage during shipping. For these reasons, this way of packaging is the standard way of shipping acrylic cases, but does add a considerable amount of time to the PC build.


However, Sunbeam thought of the end user by including an instruction sheet as well as a bill of materials list. Also, each bag of screws and small parts are labeled with the model number and a small description of what they do. Example: “PSU Mount Screws.” With these aids, building the HTPC was not only easy, it was fun!


Most of the exterior screws are thumb screws, which makes for easy access to the inside for upgrades or swapping out parts. All of the interior screws are regular Phillips head. Sunbeam includes two Phillips screwdrivers, one short and on long and skinny one, for these screws. The long, skinny screwdriver especially comes in handy for this case. Without it, it would have been difficult to not scratch the case with a regular sized Phillips screwdriver.


Overall, the case was easy to put together. Build time for only the case was about 1 hour with me watching a little TV at the same time as building it.

In order not to finger print up the amazingly clear acrylic, Sunbeam includes some white cotton gloves. A very nice touch, and certainly adds to the value of the product. Who wants a cloudy case when it’s supposed to be clear?

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