I’ve used many Mini ITX casing in my lifetime and I’ve never used a casing that’s so tiny, so tedious to setup yet felt so rewarding when actually powering up and running it.
Enter the Streacom FC8 Alpha, it is a fanless casing with specs as below as taken from the official product page.
Now the Streacom FC8 Alpha isn’t a cheap casing, retailing at USD 190 but once you went through the process of setting it up, you’ll know why but before that I’ll just have a quite talk about the packaging.
I won’t go into detail but I can tell you that they have the most impressive packaging of casing EVER! I thought NZXT was the best, they’re now second best. 😀 For FC8 Alpha alone Streacom provided a 15-page manual – color printed on glossy paper, with words big enough that you need not squint, don’t just take my word for it – go see for yourself! (PDF document).
Screw types are packaged and labelled by category so you won’t miss a thing. They’ve bundled 2 small sticks of thermal paste to use with their fanless heatpipe system.
Phew, now let’s talk about the casing itself – now here’s the view from a lower angle. You’ll see that at the front there’s a power button, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 4 circular rubber feet at the bottom and the sides are fin-like.
Being a metal casing, the fin-like structure at the side adds overall surface area for the FC8 Alpha for heat dissipation as the heatpipes will be in contact with that side of the casing through thermal paste.
From the rear you’ll see that it fits an ITX board and a single low-profile graphics card.
Once opened you’ll see a tray at the top side, that tray is to hold drives. The drive configuration is as shown on the specs table.
Underneath the tray is the area where you fit the motherboard. Note that the casing does not accommodate any PSU, you’ll have to acquire a Nano PSU to use it.
Now I won’t go through the setup process because it is a super long journey, I’ll talk about that in the next page. Overall I’m very well impressed by the build quality, it’s not just how solid the materials are but it’s how refined they are. Every edge is smooth, you have no worry of being cut in anyway.