Antec Minuet 350

Minuet – it’s not just a crappy character in a crappy Next Gen episode!

This is the surprisingly deep Antec Minuet. It’s designed to hold a media PC and slot inconspicuously into a Hi-Fi rack, which, with its clean fascia, it does quite nicely.

It comes with a 350-watt power supply that should have no problem whatsoever supplying DC-flavoured juice to anything you can fit inside the Minuet’s metal innards. This is largely because the slimline HTPC design restricts you to running MicroATX boards and half height expansion cards. Nothing too fancy here.

You should couple your board of choice together with a half height graphics card that supports hardware decoding of H.264 and VC-1 if you want an effective HTPC. ATI’s cheapest Direct X 10 card, the HD 3450, springs to mind. Anything that’s pre-DX10, however, does not.

You also should not be thinking about serious gaming with a half height card, although there’s nothing stopping you from throwing old (and still awesome) games on the computer you build in the Minuet for when you have extra people around and you just want to play something fun.

Thankfully, with low power requirements come low cooling requirements. There’s an 8cm fan in the power supply and another in the side (or top, if you slot the case in its vertical stand) that has three speed controls and runs off the 12V PSU rail with the help of a Molex pass-through adapter. You won’t notice it on its lowest setting, may notice it on its medium setting if you really tried, and on its highest speed it might be noticed by silence pedants trying to sleep in the same room.

The front of the case is slick and minimalist, and besides a power button includes an E-SATA port as well as two USB ports and the obligatory 3.5mm analogue headphone and microphone sockets. Antech has irritatingly forgotten that many the external drives that Atomicans are most likely to hook up will be ripped straight from another computer and will need some kind of power to accompany them, however.

This is forgivable, as E-SATA was designed so that encased external drives could connect straight to the motherboard while avoiding unsightly USB bridges, but provision for naked drives would have been a nice bonus.

Behind the front panel is a sliding tray that slides back a few millimetres, then swings directly up and away from the cramped battery-hen conditions that most HTPCs operate in. This makes it a lot easier to operate on the optical and two hard drives it houses. Some thoughtful shock protection has been added in the form of a large foam pad that rests against the main drive once the drive caddy is slotted back into place.

If you want a card reader, though, you’ll have to add one yourself and sacrifice one of your drives. It’s sad, but you’ll be happy to know that it’s about the only problem we had with the otherwise adequate case. Having said that, there’s nothing about it that really bowls you over in the same way that a Shuttle PC’s Tardis-like interior does.

For the price, it’s a perfectly adequate and quite swanky low-profile case that at least doesn’t look like one of those God-awful thin client office PCs.