General Use

Arctic MC001-BD Media Center

Both the power and the hard drive activity LED are blue, which looks great on the device. There is a little green light being emitted from the wireless dongle on the underside of the media player as well, but that is not really noticeable. Due to the way the drive ejects from the system, the USB connectors will get in the way of things. It may have been better for the I/O to be placed next to the drive. This is no big deal, but still a small annoyance.

Using the MC001-BD is actually loads of fun. Even though the unit does not utilize a fan, the hard drive is still quite audible. Anyone who has ever used a notebook will know how it sounds when a hard drive is utilized and can be heard from the outside. The BluRay drive is quick to read both DVDs or BluRays and thanks to the rubber coating on the base of the device, no vibration is passed on to the furniture below.

Arctic K481 Keyboard

Things are a bit different with the K481 keyboard. While it works, it is quite uncomfortable to use. Due to the very compact size of the unit and resulting tiny keys, I ended up writing a lot of things wrong. This is further complicated, that many keys are placed in new locations.

On top of that, the device goes into standby quite quickly. It requires you to push a key to reactivate it, so that you may use it again. I ended up using my thumb for the mouse pad most of the time and had a hard time drag & dropping items with one hand. In general it seems that the engineers have gone all out in shrinking the input device, without thinking of the actual usability.

Arctic P311 Headsets

I was quite intrigued about the pair of Bluetooth headsets. The P311 can easily be charged via the included USB cables. When doing so, the red LED turns on and starts pulsating. Once connected to the unit, the headset LEDs turns blue. In general they work very well and the sound is very good for units of this price class. Even though these are wireless, there is no hiss or high pitch noise.


Under normal circumstances, it would only be possible to pair one unit at a time with a Bluetooth emitting device, but thanks to the included software multiple headsets can be easily paired to the dongle. Pairing them one by one is quite easy. After pushing the main button on the device for seven seconds and starting the search on the software side, the audio device is connected the PC. Once all the headsets are connected, you can activate the audio output on these individually.


As soon as the audio is routed through the headsets, a new output device is shown in the audio properties. The HDMI audio is automatically muted as soon as everything is activated, while it works the same way if you turn the headsets off. Doing so, reactivates the HDMI audio without requiring any user input - pretty cool.

iOS App

While I currently do not own an iOS device, I still want to let you know about something else, which is quite unique in combination with the MC001 series of HTPCs. ARCTIC also offers an iOS App called "Remot MC", which is available for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and allows you to control the system and media play back with the use of touch screen. Doing so essentially eliminates the need for a keyboard and should be an intuitive input method.


On top of this, you may also turn off, sleep or hibernate the system with a simple touch. To enable this functionality you need to install a client unto the MC001, so that the iOS device finds the system in the network and can connect to it. This is definitely a cool and free addition to consider, when shopping for a HTPC system.