Streacom F12C chassi

Installation

Since there is plenty of room in this case, installing a huge PSU is no issues. A smaller one works just as fine of course. You can choose to have the fan towards the inside or the outside. There is screholes for both orientations.

And here is one small issue. As we have screwholes for both orientations it means some of them won’t be used. And that kind of puts a very minor blemish on the high quality finish of the case.

Here are some examples on how you attach various kind of drives and fans to the brackets.

According to the manual you can mount the drives in many ways. We tried to mount the big 3.5″-drive “standing” but ran into the issue that if we had the connectors pointing upwards it would not fit under the top. We guess it would work the other way around but that would on the other hand mean we would not have easy access to the cables.

Our installation was not optimal when it comes to reviewing the case with the “worst” possible collection of components (big ATX motherboard etc.).  We installed a MSI mini-ITX-motherboard. This left us with plenty of space to each side. Some of our observations after installing the components were:

• With a ATX-motherboard you will have little spae to the side of the case where you can put some of the drives or fans.
• Defending on your PSU, the space behind the PSU where you also can place drives is limited by how many cables you have tucked away there.

We decided to rest our drives horizontal and it worked fine. It does feel like we have less space though for drives than expected.

So what about the bracket and retention clip? It sounds like it should be easy to just clip the bracket and clip back to the case. We however had really big issues. The clip was very stiff and since the bracket and the clip are separate we had several misshaps where the clip suddenly flew away as we tried to press everything into the holder. In the end we had to resort to using a screw driver to press the clip into the holder, not a ideal situation.

Using the Streacom F12C

As this image shows and as we mentioned before there is a lot of ventilation holes with mesh over them in this case. This means that the noise level is really dependant of what you put into the case. if you place lots of fans in it, it can be quite noisy. If you, as we did, only have one 12 mm fan plus a CPU fan the noise level is quite low, something extra important when using it as an HTPC-chassi.