Silverstone LC16M HTPC case

iMON

Considering the complete nightmare we had getting the display on the Matrix Orbital MX610 we reviewed to display anything, we were somewhat sceptical that the VFD on the Silverstone would magically work first time. For the money, we damn well expect it to, but then that's what we thought about the Matrix Orbital.

The case comes with a customised version of SoundGraph's iMON / iMEDIAN software. We followed the installation from the CD and lo and behold, the VFD just stared at us blankly. We spent an infuriating two hours downloading the latest 58MB update from the SoundGraph's website in Korea (including one stalled download) but after installing it, everything sprung to life without requiring any user intervention.

The VFD has a pleasing blue hue and being a VFD, is readible from virtually any angle and distance. By default, it scolls through any number of vital system statistics such as free memory and hard drive space, but can also be customised to display time & date, weather updates and other useful info.


The remote control is a joy to use. If you use your Media Center for surfing the web as well, you will need a keyboard (such as the official Media Center Wireless Keyboard) but otherwise, you can perform pretty much any function you might need to using this Silverstone remote. In addition to all the regular Play / Pause / Skip / Volume controls present on any remote, there are the regular MCE functions such as the My Music / My Photo / My TV / My DVD shortcut buttons.

Silverstone's party piece is an eight-button D-pad located near the top. From here, you can move the mouse pointer, left and right-click and make selections using just the remote. Impressively, this works seamlessly in Windows XP as well as Media Center.

In fact, thanks to the installed software, so do all the LC16M's advanced media functions: the volume control knob, the play / pause buttons do exactly what you would expect of them - i.e. just work. In XP, they integrate with Media Player and if you're running MCE, they control the native functions there too. It may not have worked out of the box, but with the update installed, this was as slick as anything we have tested.

There is additional software included - a package called iMEDIAN - which runs on top of Windows and is designed to give easy access to your photos and movies. You can also use it for PVR functions e.g. recording live TV. The interface is pleasant enough and suitably chunky for TV use. It certainly isn't a match for genuine Windows Media Center but if you can't stretch to the £80 cost of MCE, iMEDIAN will sit on top of your Windows XP and is certainly better than nothing.