Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case Review

Case Assembly

Before you start to assemble the case you are going to want to set everything out like you saw I did on the previous page. Also organize all of your screws and mounting materials. Also make sure you have at least 45 minutes to an hour to assemble the case, because that’s how long it will take. When I was organizing all of the hardware I looked at one bag of mounting screws and wondered why EACH SCREW was individually wrapped. This is a real pain, especially since these specific screws are used most in the assembly. I would suggest unwrapping each screw 1 by 1 before you start assembly. Another thing I noticed was the names of the parts and mounting hardware. Usually parts are labeled A, B, C, D, etc or something similar. Check out some of these part names, 2006-ACIV-18V1, 3013-LAC-T55. Names like that make things really confusing, especially when a lot of the names are alike.



Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case

Ok so make sure you have the directions and you can get started. I’m sorry to say, but these directions are horrible. They look like something from the 1980’s, they are very hard to read and the pictures…err illustrations are really bad.

So to get things started you want to find the case feet and stick them to the bottom of the base panel. It’s really hard to see from the directions which side you actually put the case feet on. To figure this out look at the large holes towards the center of the case, the side with the bigger opening is the bottom. So from there you want to stick on the PSU mount supports and then attach the 4 corner blocks and 2 side panel blocks. Once completed it should look like this.


Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case

Next install the motherboard standoffs, they go in the large holes in the center of the panel. There are 9 standoffs total.


Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case

After you have the motherboard standoffs installed you can start building the hard drive cages. Each cage is made of 4 pieces and is screwed together. Each cage can hold up to 4 hard drives, that’s 8 total! Next you want to mount you hard drives in the cages. Once you have your hard drives installed you can install the cages in the case. Sunbeam does include a long screwdriver to make installing them fast and easy.


Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case

The next part really baffled me, you take the other 3 panel pieces and mount them in between the 2 hard drive cages. Wait a second, what about our optical drive? Nowhere in the directions does it say anything about the optical drive, it just all of a sudden appears in the illustrations after a few more steps. What you want to do is build the center panel first, install your optical drive, then install the hard drive cages. This is also flawed because how are you going to know where to line up the optical drive if the front panel is not on the case yet? I decided to go without an optical drive since I’ve been installing everything with USB flash drives for the past few months.


Sunbeam Acrylic HTPC Case

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