Assembly

To install the mainboard you actually have to remove the little cross beam. It really only serves one major purpose: to allow you to attach cables on it, to keep them from moving around within the chassis. It is also lined with a thin foam layer, to isolate any vibrations.
As you can see the board fits perfectly fine within the confines of the compartement. Alpenföhn was kind enough to supply us with an Alpenföhn Panorama cooler, which is intended for just such scenarios. Antec has left enough clearance all around for this, so you should be able to use any 100 mm low profile cooler out there.


Installing the hard drive is actually an easy task. Placing it within the little cage is no problem. The drive sits on rubber mountings so that you do not have to worry about vibrations from this area either. Sliding it into place works flawlessly as well, but you have to make sure to connect the power and data cables before hand as the plugs will be hard to reach. You can use the area above the hard drive to store any unneeded cables in.


Optical drive bay installation is done in a similar fashion and ends up being just as tight of a call as the hard drive. If you use an aftermarket CPU cooler, odds are that you will also have to employ angled connectors for the optical drive.


Once all these components are installed, you can see that things seem quite messy at first. But most of that has been encased above the hard drive. I have also routed as many cables as possible under the mainboard, so that the area is actually quite free. The two reusable zip ties were also utilized as intended, holding the ATX cable in place. This should also help when you want to place a few expansion cards within the Microfusion, as no loose cables will be in the way.

Finished Looks

Once everything has been assembled, the unit makes a great impression. The two air vents on top do allow you to view some of the cables running within the chassis, but I have seen high-end amplifiers with larger openings and much higher cable density. That said, the biggest downside of the case is actually noise. The fans are just unbearably loud in my opinion. A HTPC system of this size is not intended to house a high-end gaming rig. Even when filling the MicroFusion with a mATX 1366 board and i7 CPU along with a capable CPU cooler, I do not see the need to push and pull so much air through the chassis - especially at the lowest setting.


In terms of looks, something which is certainly one of the most important aspects, the Antec MicroFusion is one of the few HTPC cases out there that may actually be mistaken for a HiFi component instead of a PC. This is by all means a compliment, as it should fit perfectly.