BUILDING THE SYSTEM

As always the purpose of this section is not to build a functional system but rather to showcase what you can expect from the case at hand in terms of interior space and of course features.

Now as we do lately we decided to fit an X59 mainboard in the FC10 Alpha and as you can all see at first everything was great since it also left room at the left end of the chassis.

Our first problem arrived the moment we installed the tall memory modules by Kingston since by doing that we lost a bottom 3.5" drive spot. This however shouldn't be an issue since nowadays we don't see such modules with tall heat spreaders.

The main problem occurred due to a heatsink this particular model had just over the CPU area. Streacom is of course aware of such issues so they have released the ST-HT4 CPU Cooler Riser (increases motherboard compatibility by raising the heatpipes above conflicting components).

Unfortunately this wasn't send to us so we went with our previously used ASRock ATX mainboard which as you can see worked like a charm with the passive cooling solution (remember to also place thermal paste between the heatpipes and the wall of the chassis).

To mount the two 3.5" drives with ease Streacom has packed a total of 8 thumbscrews. For the 2.5" drives however you will need to use regular screws.

The FC10 Alpha is not the best solution for very long graphics cards but since this is an HTPC chassis the maximum length of 190mm should be enough (we used the HIS Radeon R7 360 OC Green for this review).

We should point out that the top PCI slot has a clearance of 190mm while the bottom has a clearance of 300mm (since most if not all graphics cards are dual slot ones however the usable length is 190mm).

Also keep in mind two things, first you need to purchase PCI-E riser cables (or cable if you just use a dual-slot graphics card) and second the cards get secured in place from the bottom and not the top as with pretty much every PC case out there.

This is far from a complete system (especially since we didn't get a NANO PSU with it) but this is pretty much what you will see if you build a system inside the FC10 Alpha.