The Case Interior

The inside of the AVC-S1 is tight but there is enough room to house a good HTPC system inside it. The chassis is long enough to house any mATX motherboard, but is also unfortunately so short that installing any full sized expansion card is out of the question. You can install up to 4 low profile expansion cards. If you are a hardcore gamer, this might be a big problem for you as not a single good PCIe video card will fit. You can also mount up to two 3.5” drives and only a single 5.25” optical drive. The pre-installed PSU is a mATX Macron 300W model. This might sound weak, but after taking into consideration that a typical HTPC system consisting of an Intel 945GZ based motherboard and Core 2 Duo 4300 CPU, 2GB of RAM, a hard disk and an optical drive consumes about 100-140W, the 300W power supply is more than sufficient. And since you cannot mount a powerful VGA card (the PSU does not offer a PCIe connector at all) or many drives, it should be more than enough for everyone.

Installing a typical system inside our GMC-S1 was fairly easy and the procedure went smoothly. Unfortunately there are few places to hide the cables into; much like inside most HTPC cases, but the system does not end up crammed after everything is installed. The only possible problem can be the optical drive, which comes over the top right corner of the motherboard. If using a longer motherboard or a motherboard with many connectors around that area, the optical drive might prove to be a bit of a problem.

Behind the mirrored front of the case, GMC placed the iMon VFD display. This 16 chars x 2 lines display can be programmed via software to display virtually anything you’d like; the time and date, the weather forecast, the news, your system data, your new e-mails, even a graphic equalizer when playing audio files. It can also display media information if you are using a popular player, like Windows Media Player or Winamp. The iMon software offers nearly endless possibilities.

iMon software

The iMon software pack is extremely intuitive, so we will only detail the main functions. As we mentioned before, the remote control can be used to have complete control over the system so that you will never need a keyboard or mouse, but the software does not limit you to just 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 with. You will find yourself typing really slow at first, until you get used to the remote control, but eventually your typing skills will improve. Finally, you can use the iMon software to control and program the front VFD display.

The main application which comes with the iMon is 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 files. It will categorize media into audio, video and pictures. The Multi-Median is very easy and friendly to use, but it could do with some improvements, such as being a little faster. We found scrolling through hundreds of pictures or songs a bit too slow for our liking.

System setup and thermal performance:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 4300 (stock cooler)
• Motherboard: Gigabyte 945GZM-S2
• HDD: Seagate ST3320620AS
• VGA: On-Board graphics adapter
• PSU: Macron 300W

In order to test the thermal performance of the case, we took temperature measurements while the system was powered on and working. We took two measurements, one with the system assembled outside of the case and one with everything in place inside of the case. We used an external thermal sensor to take readings of the ambient temperature. The chipset and CPU temperature readings were taken from the motherboard sensors. Finally, the hard disk drive temperature reading was taken from the internal HDD sensor, via the speedfan utility. Idle readings were taken after the system was left at the windows desktop for 10 minutes.  Load readings were taken after running PcMark05 continuously for one hour. We only installed an intake 2500rpm 80mm fan at the front of the case.

	CPU		Chipset		Hard disk		Ambient
	Idle	Load	Idle	Load	Idle	Load	Idle	Load
No Case	34	42	37	46	41	50	25	25
GMC AVC-S1	39	51	44	56	43	49	28	33

Despite the lack of significant active cooling and the low height, the AVC-S1 can keep an average PC system cool enough. Some low-level overclocking can be done as well; we faced no problems when we pushed our C2D 4300 processor up to 2.4GHz. Unfortunately our test motherboard would not allow a higher FSB for further testing; we were already lucky enough to reach as high as 266MHz FSB on a 945GZ chipset. The hard disk drive load temperature was actually lower inside the case because the fan offered direct airflow to the drive - the drive receives no active cooling when lying on a desk. The ambient temperature inside the case did not rise dramatically during our testing, a surefire sign that the highly perforated surfaces of the S1 help a lot with cooling.

Final words and conclusion

The AVC-S1 is a very special kind of case. Even for a HTPC case, it is somewhat restrictive and has several drawbacks, yet it is one of the few cases which are narrow enough to compare with other similarly sized home theater and mini HiFi systems. The main restriction of the S1 is the low height which does not allow the use of any full sized expansion cards. This pretty much kills the aspect of a gaming PC installed inside the S1 since not a single decent graphics card is being produced on a low-profile PCB. Gaming aside, the S1 can be a great HTPC case, especially now that several mATX motherboards with high definition display outputs got released. Many may consider the 300W Macron unit as a drawback as well, yet we believe it is more than enough for such a case since the power consumption of our test system did not ever go over 140W AC. A more powerful unit would be useless in most if not all cases, especially since the Macron PSU also proved to be quite silent.

Durability wise, the AVC-S1 is very well built. The chassis is strong enough to withstand many kilograms worth of weight on it and quite some abuse, while the paint is hard to scratch. It will certainly last for years. The iMon controller and LCD add to the prestige of the case considerably, although they also reveal another problem; if you are going to use the provided stand and place the case vertically, the LCD screen will be sideward’s and look horrible. It would be a good idea to shut down the iMon LCD completely if you are going to place the case vertically.

Because of the innovative design and high build quality, we would like to present the GMC AVC-S1 HTPC case with our Driverheaven Shortlist award.

The average retail price of the GMC AVC-S1 HTPC case is 140€ at the time of this review.

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