Antec MicroFusion Remote 350

Building and Use

In true Antec fashion, the partition around the hard disk bay has a couple of cunningly positioned holes cut into it. These allow you to route the cables conveniently underneath the hard disk and over to the 5.25in bay where they can be unobtrusively tucked away underneath.

Motherboard installation is slightly unusual in that it doesn’t incorporate the usual method of spacer bolts and screws. There are spacer bolts but only three are included and all are to one side. What's more, they're also inverted with the thread protruding up through the motherboard.

The rest of the motherboard is supported by the bottom of the case where the screw holes have been raised up like little mole hills to support the motherboard. We're not sure the merit of this system but it didn’t cause us any bother either.


The hard disk and optical drive are installed into a removable housing which then slots neatly in place. We found it easiest to make the optical drive the last thing to install into the case so as to not obstruct your cable tidying during the build.

Because of the position of the DIMM slots on our test motherboard, we were unable to install memory with oversized heat spreaders such as Corsair Dominator or any memory with anything other than a standard heat spreader. The problem comes from the SATA cables protruding from the optical drive, leaving just enough space for a standard pair of DIMMs.

Being largely made from steel, the MicroFusion is as sturdy as a rhinoceros and we had no troubles with sharp corners or edges during the build. One problem that we did have when firing up the rig though was the noise, as we mentioned on the first page. The fans aren’t the loudest in the world, but in our opinion they were unacceptably noisy for an HTPC case, hence why we have only tested with them on the lowest setting. Having fan speed adjustment is one thing, but it actually being at all useful is another thing entirely.


The screen displays information such as what track is playing and it also displays hardware statistics such as memory usage when you're not using the iMedian software, which isn't particularly useful but it is a cool touch.

The iMedian software is not only easy to use but also very easy on the eye unlike the unpolished and unintuitive rubbish that more often than not ships with the majority of TV tuners. However, you do have to add media files manually to the correct folder before you can flick through them using the interface.


In addition to playing media, iMedian will also allow you to execute tasks that you might like to do in your living room wearing a dressing gown on a Saturday morning such as check the weather and RSS news feeds. The remote control is very small and ultimately very basic, but it does the job of allowing you to manipulate the software and browse around and play your media.