Packaging

Streacom ships the unit in a plain black package with the company logo printed on the front and rear of the unit. It comes with a plastic handle and makes the package look like a suitcase.


Due to the size and weight of the chassis, it comes sandwiched between two complete foam spacers. While the unit itself has been placed inside a cloth bag at the factory.

Contents

The content ist packaged separately in a white cardboard package. This is a necessity as the heat pipes are actually quite fragile.


You will get a lot of bags with screws of all different shapes and sizes, along with various heatsinks to connect the heat pipes to the chassis. Six 6 mm heat pipes are part of the package but look completely different than what you see on the Streacom website. A simple pamphlet with a blow-up diagram is all you get, so you better know your way around heatsinks and their general assembly. Considering the need for a bit of thermal paste, it would have been nice to find a tube within the contents box.


The chassis actually does not ship with a PSU, but Streacom was kind enough to send us their Pico PSU. It is so small, that you can plug it directly into the ATX connector. In reality the unit by itself is not the PSU, just a 12V DC-DC converter. You can find the exact same unit under the model "picoPSU-150-XT" in various shops. It is intended to deliver 150W of power - plenty for our APU based system test system.


To connect the power supply properly to the internal components, a single cable with two SATA, one Molex and a P4 power plug is used. This is more than enough for our test system, but it would have been good if Streacom could have included more leads, as the PicoPSU has additional connectors which go unused.


The actual power brick is the opposite of the PicoPSU. Delivering 12V at 12.5 Amps translates to 150W as well, but this Streacom branded unit is as big as an Xbox 360 PSU. The plastic casing is not confidence inspiring, easily bends out of shape under pressure and the casing sounds hollow, which makes one wonder if the unit could have been constructed more compact. On top of that, the lack of proper certifications and the multi-lingual sticker "Caution may get hot!" make me wonder if I will end up waking up to an apartment ablaze in an inferno one night.


So Streacom has told me, that they will be offering a new and improved PSU to the retail channel. They were even kind enough to send me a picture to show me what the old one looks like inside and what the new one will be like. To ensure, that our unit looked the same on the inside, I opened it up. Let me say this: there is no way on this green earth, that the PSU could have gotten any type of CE or other seal of approval. The factory workers put a metal plate on the two smaller plates on the sides and wrapped tape around it, to hold it in place! The good news is, that - yes this is the same type of PSU shown as "old" in the picture from Streacom - just a 150W instead of the shown 140W. So make sure you get the new one when going for this chassis.