I just recently purchased a Home Theater PC case from Colorcase on Ebay. The model I purchased was the Ahanix MCE 701 with a 7" LCD Touchscreen dislplay. The case is priced around $350 to $300. This compares quite favorably to any other case with a LCD screen. Very easy build if you have experience building cases. I would highly recommend this case for the money. If you have unlimited resources go with an Origen case.
Pluses:
- Great price. Compared to Zalman or Origen.
- Very nice build quality. Much better than I anticipated. Slightly lower quality compared to Zalman (really almost the same.) The Zalman 160XT is priced around $600. I believe that Zalman hired Ahanix to design the case. Zalman case has more room for hard drives and a better hard drive cage design. Definite diference in quality between Ahanix and Origen. The 2nd Generation Origen cases are probably the finest HTPC case you can buy unfortuantely they are very expensive $600 to $700.
- Costs about the same as an Origen VFD case.
- Bright and Beautiful Touch screen.
- Suprisingly good airflow. Temps ran the same as the full tower case I took everything out of.
- Very good support from Colorcase. They responded to my email question promptly.
Minuses:
- The case can not hold 4 hard drives if you have an extended graphics card. Not a problem in my situation. I fit two hard drives along with an MSI Radeon 3870 in the case with no problems. Three internal hard drives would be tough. I used an Asus P5KE wifi editon motehrboard which has external esata connections for my external storage to hold movies and music.
- Very poor instruction manual. Download an Origen manual or refer to the website wwwmce701com. I would not recommend this case for someone building their first computer.
- A little bit of a pain to set up the various up to date drivers. I just downloaded them versus using the CD that came with case.
- No Infrared Sensor to turn the case on and off with a remote control. You can install one with a little bit of work if you want. I put one in on an old case and I personally don't really think its worth the time.
Guide created: 03/14/08 (updated 10/30/09)

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