A close up of the front of the case. The power
button glows blue when the machine is on, and has a small
red hard disk activity LED above it. The standard front of
the slimline CDROM (or DVD/CDRW) drive has been replaced with
one the same colour as the case.
To change the memory or a PCI card, a small
blue plastic tool with two prongs is provided. These fit into
the heads of the six threaded nuts that hold the top of the
case in place.
The top of the case is a thick aluminium sheet.
The finish on our case was quite shiny - you can see the reflection
of various random household objects in some of the pictures.
Once inside, the motherboard and internals
are revealed. No fans here!
Bottom left is the hard drive, in an aluminium
enclosure. The three white cables in a curve top left attach
to the USB/Firewire PCI panel (this comes as standard with
the EPIA M motherboards). The motherboard is top right, the
DC-DC converter is middle/bottom right, and the slimline optical
drive sits on top of that.
The hard drive is enclosed in an aluminium
case and mounted on thermal transfer pads, which serve to
both channel heat towards the fins and out of the case, and
also handily deaden vibrations from the drive.
PCI expansion is possible with the fitted
PCI riser card. The USB/Firewire PCI panel can be seen beneath
the PCI blanking plate.
Onwards, Next
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