When you start building your system you will find the available space for cables and devices very confined. I can almost say that a modular type of power supply unit is necessary for using this case, or you might end up with substantial cable clutter. The ATX extension cable for the iMON VFD certainly will not help things. Of course with some patience and imagination you can keep the system quite tidy. You can see our final result in the picture above, the system is fully assembled and tidy enough without too much attention and time while building it.

The iMON VFD is the main feature of the M-Station case. You can program the VFD through this application to show you almost anything, ranging from system data and your e-mail accounts to the time and weather in many parts of the world. The VFD can also recognize popular applications, such as Windows Media Player and Winamp, which will turn the VFD to a graphic equalizer while you are playing songs. Next to the VFD screen there are two LED lights, one for power and one for disk access. Both are blue and in our opinion they are way too bright, as if you are sitting in front of the case they almost certainly are going to be irritating.

The iMON software pack is extremely long to thoroughly describe, so we will stick on the basic parts of it. As I mentioned before, the remote controller can be used to give complete control over the system, so that you will never need a keyboard or mouse. But the software does not limit itself to that. It provides some extra features as well, such as the ‘Alarm’ feature which can make your PC a very effective alarm clock. This feature is especially useful when paired with the appropriate WAV file!

There is also a Virtual Keyboard, which you can use to type text with. You will find yourself typing really slow at first, until you get used to the remote controller, but eventually your typing skills will improve. The main application which comes with the iMON is the Multi-Median by SoundGraph Inc. This software is a full screen multimedia player which overrides the Windows Explorer much like the Windows XP Media Center, but without removing your own wallpaper with its own background. The Multi-Median can scan your hard disk drive and find all of the available media to play. It will categorize media itself to audio, video and pictures. The Multi-Median is very easy and friendly to use, but it could use some improvements, such as being a little faster. We found scrolling through hundreds of pictures or songs a bit too slow for our liking however.