Streacom F7C EVO HTPC Chassis Review

The Streacom is a fairly unassuming chassis and in many ways, it’s plain, a little dull and it doesn’t even pack that many features, it is for all intents and purposes a simple box and little else. Yet I think that was the point and it’s this minimalistic approach that makes it so cool in the first place.

Streacom have designed it so that there are no major moving parts, in fact there are none and there are no adjustable panels with the exception of the PCI slot cover. The front loading optical disc slot it’s just a simple cut out and it features a universal eject button in the centre, the power button is just a straight forward round button, no fuss, no mess, there isn’t even a reset switch here, just on and off. There is however plenty of ventilation and more than enough room for a competent CPU cooler and a couple of hard drives, but that’s about all you really need in a rig like this.

Sure we’ve stuck in an i5 2500k and a high-end mITX board, but you could just as well install an integrated Atom board, or an AMD APU system and make yourself a moderately competent gaming system out of this. Yet for all its exterior simplicity, the whole thing made perfect sense once I placed it under my TV. It’s like a ninja, it sits there in hiding in the shadows, quietly and unobtrusive and thanks to the IR sensor on the front you need not mess up that clean look with scruffy wires, allowing for a sleek HTPC solution that is perfect for turning any TV into a smart TV.

It’s not without its faults however and I’m sure many would have liked room for a full size PCIe card in there, even at the cost of the chassis being a little larger to accommodate it, but this wasn’t really designed for stuffing big graphics cards in any way, it’s just nice to have that option. There are no extra fan mounts either and while I doubt they’ll be required it’s still nice to have them and even a single 80mm mount would have been nice. The PSU is also mighty expensive and it does bring the cost up quite a bit, but no more so than a most other highly stylised HTPC cases when you factor in a suitable PSU.

Yet the chassis makes up for those short falls with a few other nice touches, the expensive PSU does allow for a small chassis, it also keeps a lot of heat out of the chassis by using the transformer brick on the power cable, this means there is no PSU fan and that also helps keep noise down. Not having the PSU in the chassis keeps internal heat down a lot and the only thing moving in there was our Akasa CPU cooler, which is super quiet on its own, you may even be able to fit a nice silent cooler in there along side an SSD hard drive and you would literally never here a peep from this system unless you were loading an optical disc. It’s also crafted out of 4mm aluminum and that means build quality is going to last a lifetime before degrading and I’m pretty sure it could survive more than a few knocks and bumps too, although that may scratch up that sand blasted paint job, so I don’t care to test that theory.

Overall I really do like the F7C and while its a little bit expensive for my taste, but that doesn’t mean to say I wouldn’t be very happy if someone bought it for me as a gift, but I do think that the price is justified by the use of thick aluminum panels, sure you could have made this from plastic and steel, but it wouldn’t have the same classy edge that it does now. I’m going to award it with our Editors Choice Award, but with an advisory, yes I do recommend this product, but only as a HTPC, or an APU based media system, since we don’t have a HTPC Award, it seems to be the award that best fits it’s performance.

Streacom F7C EVO @ Overclockers.co.uk