Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis

[Apoptosis]

Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis

Thermaltake introduced the SD100 to target the Mini-ITX home theater HTPC market. With a sleek, glossy black exterior and well ventilated interior, the SD100 is designed to be functional while blending into the rest of a high tech home theater setup. Read on to see what we think of this budget friendly $85 case!

Thermaltake's SD100 small home theater chassis stands out as a case that blends in extremely well. Think about that for a moment. The glossy black finish, the small footprint, and the silver buttons make for a computer case that would make any home theater setup look better without drawing much attention. For installation, Thermaltake did an excellent job designing the interior to maximize cooling while giving users enough room to fit components easily. With solid construction, a great air filter, and quiet fans, the SD100 serves as a great entry level HTPC case.

Article Title: Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1133/1/

[skier]

one thing, it looks like a newer VCR

cool little box though

[little_tea_pot]

I've built two HTPC's with the Compucase version of this case.. One with the 120w and the other with the 200w power supply, and both are half the price.

[eden999]

This one's quite different, usualy htpc cases are laid out on the side, and not upright. I don't like how it's upright, since you can't stack i on your dvd player or other component.

[Orville]

This is a fair looking box, but which late model video cards will fit in it, if any? We all know that no AMD IGP northbridge provides complete 7.1 audio via HDMI and no Intel IGP video is worth a damn, so both of those require a PCIe x 16 graphics board to output Blu-ray video and high quality audio. Is this box designed only for an Nvidia husky 65nm Ion motherboard? Maybe so. One more thing-is there a PSU available for the box that has an A.C. power switch, at extra cost even? I don't buy any equipment that makes me unplug it to turn it off, so this leaves out Flex ATX PSUs.

[JMMD]

Kind of reminds me of a old VCR in some of those pictures. Not the look I would go for in my HT.

[AbyssNOLF]

I will agree that the case does look like a newer VCR, but it still comes off as highly polished and I think it does well blending with other components. As the review pointed out, it doesn't have much additional flair to set it apart as an HTPC case, but what it does, it does well. I would also agree that it's not the cheapest option, and there are plenty of competitors offering similar packages for less. Still, after all my scouring of similar cases in similar or lower price ranges, there is something to say about that largely indefinable quality of elegance that the SD100 seems to have.

The case does not have slots for expansion cards, so it's designed for all-in-one boards. This isn't a problem for the newer Zotac ION boards (and other boards based on the ION platform), all of which can play blu-rays with the NVidia ION graphics platform quite well while also delivering quality HD sound. Of course, if you want to push high-end to the extreme, add-on cards might be necessary, so this case wouldn't work at all for that.

As for the power supply, it has no physical AC switch to turn it off. Furthermore, the aforementioned Zotac boards all have external PSUs (with the exception of their newest F series), meaning the power supply in this case could very well be redundant.