SilverStone Technology Home Theater Computer Case

First I'll start by saying that I have as of this review built 6 HTPCs using this case in the last 4 months. I originally bought this to house my HTPC after I decided I no longer wanted a desktop tower sitting next to my entertainment center. With that as a limitation on my size choices I searched for weeks and kept coming across this case, but the price tag honestly scared me, since my last experience with a specifically designed case for an HTPC was less than stellar. But after comparing it to others, I kept coming back to it and eventually decided it would fit what I needed. **UPDATE: Since there seems to be an issue with people knowing the exact dimensions of this case they are: 440mm(W) x 175mm(H) x 425mm(D)or in inches: 17.3in(W) x 6.8in(H) x 16.7in(D) **UPDATE: Since My original Review I have now built 8 HTPCs with this case and none have had any issues. **UPDATE: Also something I forgot to mention, this case IS RACK MOUNTABLE... It has rack mounting points on the sides... So now on to the actual review: Pros: Space, lots and lots of space. Positive pressure design with filters. Very nice look, the case looks and acts well built. Aesthetics, it looks better than my receiver and other components, easily the best looking component in my home theater. Allows for full size components. Room for more hard drives than you could need. Removable Drive Cage with handles. Room for 10 Internal Hard Drives (Without adapters) (8) 3.5 Inch Bays (7 to the right of the 5.25 bays, 1 to the left) plus (2) 2.5 mounts above the 5.25 inch bays. Cons: (for what I want this is a con, but not for most people) 2 80mm fan mounts on the back above i/o panel, good for exhaust fans, but no standard liquid cooling solutions fit on an 80mm mounting point as of this review. The drive door triggers can be a pain to align to your dvd/blu-ray drive causing the door to not open when the button is pressed or to open/close constantly (but with some adjusting this is sorted out) Honestly this case looks more like a Home Theater component as opposed to a PC. I get people asking fairly often where my computer is, (since everything we watch runs through it) When I point it out they are truly surprised. I have built 5 more HTPCs using this case thanks to people seeing mine and loving the look. With these I have used nothing but full size components, which is great since airflow and dimension restrictions are not really a problem (there are some to be aware of but I'll cover those later) The positive airflow keeps the dust out, I clean my filters out about 1 time per month with a dog and 2 cats in the house, but I haven't had any real dust in the case, it gets picked up by the filters, in 4 months no dust issues. I'm extremely pleased with this case and I will continue to use it if people want me to build them a Home Theater PC... It is made of quality steel, even empty with the cover and drive cage out it does not bend or twist. (this is a big issue with many HTPC cases) Some things you do need to watch for are Video card height and length, the case only has 140mm of height above the motherboard, so be sure you aren't using an extra tall video card, also if you plan to fill up your hard drive case with drives pay attention to the length, clearance gets tight with hard drives mounted in the bays at about 9 inches... although with 8 places to mount 3.5 inch drives and 2 2.5 bays along with the 2 5.25 bays you have tons of ways to avoid interference with your video card. Pay attention if you are using a tall CPU cooler, the max height of the cooler is 140MM, also going with a extra wide one might make cable routing difficult for your disc drives. The removable drive cage is a lifesaver when it comes to mounting your drives, it is simple to pull out and put back thanks to the handles (this is important since 5 drives plus blu-ray and an SSD could be difficult to situate without the handles. Ok, now I've gushed about the case lets look at the short list of cons I had... First the 2 80MM fan mounts above the I/O panel are useful for fans, but I really wanted to do a liquid cooling solution, but none of the standard sealed models utilize 80MM mounts, so I compromised and just put some fans in, for most people this is a good thing to have 2 additional fan locations, but I really wanted to do liquid cooling... The 2 drive doors have triggers that sit against the open/close buttons on your drives. These can be a little tricky to align, I had this issue on my Asus Blu-ray but it was much simpler with a Sony one. So to wrap up, This could very well be the case you're looking for. If you want a case to fit in just about any home theater setting this works perfectly. It is worth the price and I would recommend it to almost anyone. The only thing it doesn't have that some might want is an LCD screen, but for me, it's a great fit. These cases are very versatile, I have built one with an M-Atx board and only a small SSD (to serve network media) many in between and even one with an E-Atx board with 32.5TB of storage (8 4GB Drives), 2 blu-rays etc... Components in my new Personal Build: 7/05/2013 Case: Silverstone Tek GD-08 SSD of OS/Programs: SAMSUNG 840 256GB 2.5 SATA III Power Supply: Corsair AX760i (Fully Modular) Motherboard: AsRock z87 Fatal1ty Professional CPU: Intel 4th Generation Haswell Core i7 4770K Memory: Crucial Ballistix Very Low Profile DDR3, 4x8GB (32GB total) Optical Drive: LG Blu-Ray Reader/DVD Writer Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 650-Ti SSC 1GB CPU Cooler: Arctic Freezer Pro Rev 2 Storage Drives: 4 Western Digital Red 3TB Drives 80mm Fans: 2 Fractal Silent Series 120MM Fan: 1 Zalmann Ultra Quiet (This only came with Rubber mounts, luckily I had some extra fan screws)(See customer images for why this was important) Components in my Old personal Build: Silverstone Tek GD-08 Case ASUS P8Z77-V Pro Intel Z77 4DIMM ATX2400 Corsair Enthusiast Series TX850 V2 850W 80+ Bronze SAMSUNG 840 250GB 2.5 SATA III Intel Core i7-3770K 3.50 GHz LGA1155 Kingston XMP 16GB 1866MHz DDR3 CL9 (Kit of 4) XMP Blu-ray Optical Drive 4 Western Digital Red 3 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2, CPU Cooler - Intel & AMD, Multi-Directional Mount, 92mm PWM Fan EVGA GeForce GTX 650 1024MB GDDR5 DVI mHDMI Graphics Card Everything fit without an issue, and my CPU temp has never reached above 50 Degrees Celsius. I can't say enough about this case...