News - Silverstone announces a new HTPC case: the Milo ML05

[HEXUS]

Small but flexible new seven litre mini-ITX case includes an "innovative" 4-in-1 storage bracket.

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[kawauso]

€37.50 actually seems remarkably reasonable for what sounds like quite a flexible case, assuming that's including VAT of some kind anyway.

[cheesyboy]

Looks a bit low-rent but, to be fair, that is a cheap price

[cjs150]

As a design it seems to me to be very badly flawed.

For an HTPC the key issue is noise. Noise comes from 3 areas: fans, hard disks and optical drives.

To be fair most mechanical HDs are quiet particularly if you go for a 5400 rpm version. In any event a far better solution is to have a decent sized SSD and a large NAS is a different room.

Fans: this is always a compromise between cooling potential and noise. Two low spinning 80mm fans blowing across the motherboard should be sufficient to keep components cool together with an appropriate cooler on the CPU. Problem is that the open nature of the case design allows lots of noise to escape

Optical Drive: assuming you want one, this is an area no case maker gets right. No case maker yet provides proper anti vibrations dampening for slim line optical drives - this is a major flaw.

Unless you are on a very tight budget I would recommend a fan less case from Wesena, Hdplex or similar for an HTPC - or if you do not need a separate GPU, maybe wait for the Intel NUC i5 but drop it into the Tranquil fanless case

[UseItNow]

Love the front, wonder if it'll cross over onto their GD range?

It is a nice looking case and for the price, it does have a lot IMO.

Shame its mITX, personally need more than 1 PCI-E slot. I'll definitely consider this on my next build.

[kopite]

As a design it seems to me to be very badly flawed.

For an HTPC the key issue is noise. Noise comes from 3 areas: fans, hard disks and optical drives.

To be fair most mechanical HDs are quiet particularly if you go for a 5400 rpm version. In any event a far better solution is to have a decent sized SSD and a large NAS is a different room.

Fans: this is always a compromise between cooling potential and noise. Two low spinning 80mm fans blowing across the motherboard should be sufficient to keep components cool together with an appropriate cooler on the CPU. Problem is that the open nature of the case design allows lots of noise to escape

Optical Drive: assuming you want one, this is an area no case maker gets right. No case maker yet provides proper anti vibrations dampening for slim line optical drives - this is a major flaw.

Unless you are on a very tight budget I would recommend a fan less case from Wesena, Hdplex or similar for an HTPC - or if you do not need a separate GPU, maybe wait for the Intel NUC i5 but drop it into the Tranquil fanless case

Most people I know now dont have hd`s in their HTPC and prefer to have everything in a file server. SSD or sd card for os is all you need.

Optical drive Is still a problem but with the likes of netflix/lovefilm the need to have physical media is starting to wane.

In regards to fans for a htpc it should be possible to passively cool it nowadays.

The case looks pretty good although i`d have prefered some kind of display like their bigger cases butfor the price you cant complain much

[cjs150]

Kopite: I would agree on the mechanical HDs. I have an HTPC with an SSD all media storage is dealt with by a 6TB NAS which is in a completely different room. The problem with the NAS is that if you use W8 (which works well on an HTPC) then you have to use some fudging to get w8 libraries to work with the NAS (or have a server).

I have not used Netflix but I do use Lovefilm. Even with a fast (20Mb) broadband, Lovefilm HD quality is not better than mediocre. No HD audio, compression is really obvious with a lot of stuttering. But if you have an HTPC surely one of its roles should be to rip your existing media.

[aceuk]

The new Haswell Intel NUC would make a great HTPC if all of your files are stored on a NAS or streamed.