Digital Home

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The ThermalTake DH 102 Digital Home series (to give it its full name) comes packaged in a standard PC case carton, with lots of shiny pictures all over the front showing off the cases key feature; the 7” LCD panel.

The sides carry on providing you with more statistics and feature bullet lists to further persuade you to part with your cash.

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With the case you get a varied bunch of accessories, including a driver CD – which is probably a first for an enclosure, a remote control complete with ‘LONLIFE’ batteries, a cleaning cloth, a manual, and a whole bunch of screws and all the other little bits of metal that’ll allow you to plonk your components into the case.

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The remote is a carbon copy of the other iMON remotes, just coloured black with a small ThermalTake logo at the bottom; all the other functions and buttons remain the same.

External

Front

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Once out of the box, you’ll probably end up like myself; all excited about a screen that’s much smaller than every modern TFT screen, but for some reason incredibly cool. The screen sits on the left hand side of the case, and takes up the same room as a couple of 5.25” drives stacked on top of each other. The screen features a resolution of 800x600 which is pretty impressive considering its 7” size, not only this, there is a touch-screen panel in front which acts as a USB mouse allowing you to not only see, but control your PC without a monitor.

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To enhance the no-peripheral aspect, there are several control buttons located to the right of the display that allow you to control the various facets of the iMEDIAN/iMON application which we’ve seen previously on iMON’s own display module, and the Silverstone MFP51. You get a button to pop open the main window, exit, escape, direction keys, enter, start, menu and a large volume knob which when pressed mutes the sound. The remote contains even more options that have been explained fully in the previous iMEDIAN reviews.

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At the top of the front facia, you’ll find a heavily inset IR sensor for the remote control. It’s a good 3 mm deep meaning that the whole front which is made entirely of brushed aluminium is 3mm thick which screams quality. The bottom of the front has an accented silver bar which holds the power switch on the left side, a front I/O push-panel and finally the HDD LED with the case name in the bottom right. The I/O contains all the usual suspects with two USB, audio in and out and a FireWire port. An e-SATA port would have been nice to see, but this new connector is still not as prevalent as FireWire despite the speed increase.

There is only one external 5.25” drive bay, which is covered with an aluminium flap with a small button to the right hand side which controls ejecting. There is no space for an activity light, so you’ll have to rely on your PC letting you know whether the disc is being read.

Thankfully, ThermalTake have decided against having a floppy disc bay which means that if you use a RAID disc or similar, you’ll have to red-neck rig it to your PC. While this approach does show progress (i.e. moving away from older technology) it’ll leave a couple of prospective buyers thinking again.

Sides and rear

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The sides of the case are made of thick steel and are covered with holes forming large vents on the top and on the side. Hopefully this should provide enough air-flow to keep your favoured components nice and chilly.

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Looking at the rear, you’ll find the slot for the PSU, the motherboard blanking plate and seven PCI brackets. This means that the case can take a full sized ATX board, not just the micro version. To provide additional cooling, there are two 60mm 1800 RPM fans which sit above the motherboard I/O. You’ll also notice the two black clips at the top which are used for the tool-less PCI card mounting system making installation easier.

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Out the back, you’ll see that the seventh slot has a VGA cable poking out which is used to power the front display. The VGA cable is pretty long considering where is got to connect to. Also, there is a bit of wear between the PCI bracket and the cable showing that it’s been stretched at some point.

Feet

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The bottom of the case features some good-looking although not particularly in keeping with the rest of colour-scheme. They’re gold plated in brushed aluminium which looks good but gold with black and silver isn’t the greatest combination.