Assembly

You realize this as soon as you remove the top panel:

That’s a curious internal design for you. Even if you’ve already dealt with HTPCs and think yourself experienced, you should still browse through the manual ?this is going to save you a lot of time. The case must be dismantled before you start assembling a computer in it. You don’t have to take out too many things ?first remove the panel with the exhaust fans:

The two low-speed, low-profiled fans are powered via an ordinary Molex for some reason. To avoid creating a mess of cables inside the case, I advise you to get rid of this connection at once and re-solder both the fans to one standard 3-pin connector, attaching it to the mainboard. Just don’t forget that you don’t have to connect the wires of the rotation speed sensors ?you can do with one only and cut the other off completely (it’s enough to control the speed of only one of them since the fans are identical). The fans panel removed, you can next take out the cardboard box with accessories.

There are just a few items here. On top the heap there is a power adapter which supplies +5V standby voltage to the display in standby mode.

For example, you cannot turn the computer on from the remote control without this adapter. But why is it so sloppily made? Do you really need such a huge adapter to take two wires from the power supply aside? So, my recommendation is again to cut this thing down to decent size. It only takes a few minutes to solder the wires directly to a PSU cable, but you’ll save quite an amount of space inside the case as the result. Considering there’s not much room in the Media 260, it is stupid to squander it for such weird adapters.

Next, there are two angle bars included:

They are meant for mounting the case into a standard stand for hi-fi equipment, if you need to. You get two manuals with your Media 260:

One manual describes how to assemble the system, the other is concerned with the setup options of the iMON software. Yes, this software and a remote control are included by default with Cooler Master’s Media 260:

I wrote about the capabilities of the iMON software earlier so I won’t dwell upon them now (for edtails see our article called Thermaltake Bach and Mozart HT PC Review). However, I’d like to say that Cooler Master made a right choice. This is one of the best available solutions to transform a PC into a multimedia center, and one of the most convenient if you are going to control your system remotely.