Origen X15e HTPC case

We've seen quite a few home cinema cases pass through these pages recently, including the awesome Zalman HD160 and the Silverstone Lascala. We found the Zalman to be a fantastic case, if a little chunky, that did everything required of a HTPC.

Today we're looking at a chassis from a new company, Origen. What makes this a little different is that the X15e has an LCD display in the very front of the case. It's available from SpecialTech for £465.

Looking at the exterior, you can see the standard black brushed aluminium styling. The quality is a little higher than some cases we've seen, with the case feeling a little more solid. You can get the X15 in silver if you really want, depending on the colour of the rest of your equipment. You can see how the LCD screen dominates the front of the machine.

There are a number of buttons under the LCD display. The big one is the power button, which is just attached via the standard pin connector. The others are controls for the screen itself including power on, input select and menu backwards and forwards.

The right hand side of the case has the DVD drive and a fold-out panel that hides a 3.5" drive bay and some front ports including USB and headphones. You could use the drive bay for a floppy disk (if you still hang on to those) or, more usefully, a fan controller or card reader. The front ports have all the pin headers that you'd expect. The DVD drive has a fascia add-on to keep the look and feel of the front. We'll come to that...

The side panels have no ventilation, which you may find to be a problem if you're planning on putting in very hot components. However, the lack of fan grilles does keep the side looking extremely sleek.

Moving around to the back, you can see a vertically oriented PSU mount right next to a full ATX motherboard backplate. There are two 80mm fans mounted over the motherboard, which isn't a great design because we all know that dual 80s can be rather loud. It would be great to have a 120mm back there, but we suspect that this would make the chassis just too high. You can obviously replace the port backplate with whatever one came with your motherboard.

Let's go and poke around inside.