A Closer Look - Outside

The Streacom FC5 OD makes a really good first impression. The quality is excellent, so is the anodizing job. A thick slab of Aluminum makes up the front panel and Streacom has done good by not placing a company logo on here. My guess is, that they are shopping the chassis around to system integrators as we speak - which is certainly not a bad thing.


There is absolutely no front I/O found on the chassis, which some may find unappealing. It would have been nice to have an SD card slot for example. The rear is what you would expect to see from a chassis of this form factor. Needless to say, you will not be able to install an expansion card vertically due to the thin dimensions of the FC5 OD. Both sides may act as heatsinks, but as we will see later on, only the right side will be attached to the heatpipes leading to the CPU.


Taking a closer look at the front, there is the slot-in slimline bay. The eject button is to the left, which works for a small number of SATA based slimline drives, but the bulk of current drives - including all Blu-Ray ones have an eject button which is just to the right of the middle. Streacom will need to fix this as soon as possible, as this will be an issue for a large customer base. The company sells the Sony AD-7640S drive as an accessory, but that one is not capable of playing back Blu-ray disks. Besides that, there is a little opening for the IR receiver next to a round power button and tiny blue power LED.


In the rear you will find the opening for the motherboard backplate on one end. On the other is a single full length expansion slot, but you will require a riser card or ribbon to take advantage of it. Streacom could probably have included one for PCIe x16, but odds are that some may want to use the IDE or smaller PCIe interface. These ribbons are available for a few Euros on Ebay, thus the exclusion is not a big deal and you can simply go for the one you need. Next to the slot is the opening to route the power supply lead through as we will see later on.


There is a single vent on top of the chassis and one on the underside. Streacom has designed the chassis in such a way, that the hard drives are to be installed unto the floor of the chassis as you can see by the rubber ringed holes on the underside.