This is an exceptionally good case. I was absolutely blown away by how well it is designed and built, and the function is absolutely phenomenal.
I have had several Niveus fanless PC’s. They were great cases and had excellent thermo-regulation. The downside to the Niveus was cost – they were thousands of dollars. As they are no longer in production and several years old, I was looking around for a new fanless case. this was the only one I could find that looked like there was even 10 minutes worth of thought put into the design and function. It turns out that this is bar none the best thermo-regulating PC chassis available on the market today.
First, look at these numbers- I ran Prime95 stress test on three chassis: The HD-Plex H1.S, another Mini-ITX system with a CPU fan and case fan, and a Dell Precision M4800 laptop (workstation quality laptop). After 5 minutes, the processors in both the Dell and the Mini-ITX chassis were at 180 deg. F. Contrast that with the H1.S which was at only 170 deg. F after nearly 2 HOURS!!!. The ability of this chassis to move heat away from the processor and radiate it from the case fins is clearly superior to a standard CPU fan. I continued to run Prime95 for nearly 4 hours and the chassis stabilized at around 174 deg. F and never went higher.
This amazing thermo-regulation coupled with the fact this the computer was SILENT (no fan noise) really blows me away. I can not believe that there are not more fanless PC cases being built…This case should be marketed to more than just the high end media server crowd! After seeing these results I am considering switching my every day use desktop to this chassis.
The build spec I used follows:
HD-Plex H1.S fanless chassis w/ 120w AC/DC converter and 160w power supply combo
ASRock z97e-ITX mobo
Intel i3 4130T
Crucial Ballistics Sport RAM (2x4gb)
Samsung 850 1TB SSD
Geekbench 32-bit score of 6340
Quiet PC Case – HD PLEX