HIPER HMC-2K53A-A0 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

Pros: Awesome form factor & a true media center design. You'll be hard pressed to find something similar in this size. The shortcomings are easy to overcome for a do-it-your-selfer.

Cons: Not sure if it's the QA at Hiper, or shipping, but mine came dented on the back. No biggie. Just pushed it out as there was no hard bends. The IR receiver takes up a DIMM slot, even though it doesn't use the slot in any way other than to hold it in place. I''m sure they could of did better here. No included riser cards. PSU can get a little loud for my taste. The remote is meh. Can't customize the display, and it's slow to update. Movie title may take 10 minutes to change when running media center, or no change at all. Sometimes displays random stuff, like it's recording when it's not. Not sure who to blame, Windows or Hiper. I think the internal wiring could of been consolidated better, but I guess they have to consider many different mother boards. Wish the HD mounting bracket used grommets. Head noise resinates A LOT in this case.

Overall Review: I ripped out the included PSU & used a 120W PicoPSU with an external brick. I highly recommend this route. Dead silent. I wish Hiper did this themselves. Consider the height of your heat-sink. Not many choices out there. You have Hiper's, or a 1U server cooler which don't take noise into consideration. I modified a stock intel cooler and replaced the fan with a 15mm high 80mm fan. Just barely fits. Temps stay around 40-45 with an e7200. I drilled my own holes and used grommets to mount the HD bracket to the case. Reduce HD noise by 90%. This may not work if you're using a CD-ROM drive (I am not). I still give it a 4 because the shortcomings are easy to overcome, and it does what it promises well.

Pros: It has a sleek design, has almost all the functions you need. It is great and fantastic, if you can put it together correctly with the right parts.

Cons: Parts can be a bit fragile. It can get very difficult to fit things together. You have to buy the right parts, probably what is mentioned on their site. You need to buy a power cord, slot-in DVD/Blu ray drive, and card riser if you want to use PCI and PCIe.

Overall Review: This is a wonderful case, with some major tweaking needed. I bought the PCI riser (only one available in the US), but it will not fit with the Hauppauge HVR-1600. I had to saw off the end to fit it next to the PCI-express slot. Asus motherboards did not work, as I found out, unfortunately. Gigabyte boards work, but a tight fit where the card reader is. Only Blu Ray slot in drives are only available in Europe. Also, when putting on the slot-in drive, it needs to be put in a little forward for it to fit flat with the case. Otherwise, this case and power supply has everything you need. The parts are fragile, so you have to be careful, but at the same time, you need major wiring management skills. I love the case. I wish the parts were a bit sturdier than may of the plastic parts inside.

Pros: This case includes everything a good htpc case should. So far, it has been able to power my mini-itx board with a 45w AMD processor, 4 gigs of ram, 500gb WD slim ide, and a slot load slim blu-ray. I like the fact that it takes the slim optical drives although i don't recall seeing that anywhere. The VFD is simple enough and I have not noticed the time going out of sync.

Cons: I read all the reviews but still got it. The front cover is glossy and very attractive, but the buttons get stuck. I am not yet sure what is wrong with the power button but it shuts down my pc and refuses to boot until I disconnect the power header. Removing the front cover is necessary during setup but it's not easy and some of the plastic tabs broke. The slot for the blu-ray does not line up and does not have any adjustment. Disc rub or get stuck on eject.

Overall Review: For the high price, you would think quality would be better. Overall it's a good case, very attractive but the problems with the buttons is pathetic. Hiper does not respond to emails and conveniently, has no USA phone numbers. My VFD works so i guess I could be worse off.

Pros: Looks Nice. Really seems like a great deal

Cons: The first case I received had a defective VFD. So I had to RMA this to Hyper. The thing is the card reader and the chip-like piece that fits into a ram slot have very cheap connections. The card reader connector was breaking as I tried to remove it from the case. No big deal. I send the case the PSU the Ram-like chip and the card reader to Hyper. Well they only returned to me the Case and the PSU. So here we are, what would have made a nice Christmas Gift is now an expensive semi-functional computer case. I hope Hyper is good enough to send me these parts they kept. 2 eggs for hope it will work out.

Overall Review: Given all this hassle I would go with a case that has a different return policy... Silverstone has a nice similar case here on Newegg for only 9 bucks more than I paid, and it has the Standard Return policy.

Pros: Great form factor. A lot of stuff packed into that small space. People complain about the small power supply / large fan, but 200 watts is really more than you will ever need in an HTPC, and the fans on the computer are considerably quieter than those in my projector, which isn't that loud as it is. Hiper's customer service is great as.

Cons: The VFD on my first one was DOA, but Hiper's customer service is great and had a new one to me within a week, no questions asked.

Overall Review: Not much documentation comes with it, but the setup is fairly straight forward.

Pros: Absolutely amazing form factor. My HD-DVD player has a larger footprint than this. The USB Wifi (ralink) and USB IR receiver (mceusb2) is compatible with linux (mythbuntu 8.04.1). Couldn't find anywhere else that mentioned that, guess I lucked out. Haven't yet tried to get the front LCD to work, but it looks like the kernel module for it loaded, so I don't think I'd have any problems if I really cared enough. Just using this as a mythtv frontend, have a separate backend server.

Cons: PSU has 2 small fans. Though not terribly loud, can be heard in quiet scenes (more quiet than the fans during BluRay playback on my PS3 at least). I may replace with a PicoPSU-120 if it bothers my g/f too much, though because of the position of the ATX connector on my MB, using a PicoPSU would prevent the use of the built-in multi-card reader (which I don't use anyhow). Also, couldn't put in the PCI slot cover as there wasn't enough clearance, hits my MB's audio jacks. And, my 2.5" SSD drive doesn't have a place to mount, just kind of sits in the 3.5" HD bay, but that's ok, not like I'm carrying the unit around.

Overall Review: A _quiet_ low-profile CPU fan can be hard to find. Newegg _had_ the Silverstone NT07-AM2 which I used (N82E16835220030), but they no longer do (showing as discontinued). I used a GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G motherboard and a AMD BE-2400 45W 2.3G X2 processor, as well as a Transcend TS8GSSD25S-S 2.5" 8GB SATA SSD drive (only using 1.5GB after installing mythbuntu as a frontend-only).

Pros: Very nice looking case, fits right in with a living room. Built-in wireless, VFD, memory card reader, are a bonus.

Cons: Motherboard temps run pretty warm. Only room for one expansion card and probably not enough cooling for it to be an ATI all-in-wonder, but that is the price you pay for having such a sleek design.

Overall Review: The hardest part is getting all the wires to lay down and fit in the case. I pulled out everything I didn't need. You need a low profile CPU cooler, the stock Wolfdale cooler is about 5 mm too tall. Hiper makes a cooler to fit though. I'm probably going to cut another hole in the case over the southbridge and put a 40 mm fan to get air running over my motherboard/tunercard. The PSU is only rated at 200W, but it is powering my system just fine. Also the previous poster reviewed the barebones version with this case, this is just the case! All you get is what is shown in the pictures, so you have to install your own mobo, drives, etc too.

Pros: Great choice for someone who does not want a bulky, PC-sized box in the living room. Packed with some really nice features built in. Got to add that all of these features worked just as advertised right out of the box. Quite impressive imho. Highly recommend the low profile CPU cooler that Hiper sells, available for Intel as well as AMD processors. I got mine from Newegg, of course.

Cons: Probably not a great choice. for the novice builder. Comes with absolutely zero in the way of documentation or assembly instructions. All you get is a box of parts as shown. Fortunately, it's fairly well engineered as it comes. This is the 3rd generation of these boxes put out by the folks at Hiper, so a lot of issues that I found from various on-line sources have been fixed in this release. Be aware that this case is extremely cramped on the inside once you get it all loaded, so smart cable management is a challenge. Hiper also sells this unit as a barebones which includes an AMD-based MSI motherboard and a really nice finished I/O back panel. Newegg Item#:N82E16856171002. Should solve some of the tougher issues for you. An Intel-based barebones is supposedly on the way too. Don't expect much in the way of support from Hiper from what I read on the forums. Fortunately that wasn't necessary in this case.

Overall Review: Building with this case was an enjoyable task. When it's all done you have got a really nice machine on your hands.