Finished Looks

There is no real way to tell if the system is up and running unless you are staring at the monitor or looking at the power LED. I have placed the external power brick next to the system so you can estimate its size.


The afore mentioned LED is extremely tiny, which is actually a great thing. That tiny blue glow looks spiffy and goes perfectly with the FC5 OD.

Thermal Performance

It is always of interest how well a passive solution performs. In terms of desktop components, you have a choice between various CPUs with different TDP levels. Generally 45, 65, 95, 125W are some of these barriers. For this review to be representative of the expected usage scenario, the AMD APU - plenty of performance for a HTPC - carries a TDP of 65W. To push the device, RealTemp was used to place a Load on the CPU, while Furmark with the "Xtreme burn-in" setting was running. After around 25 Minutes, the passive Streacom FC5 OD manages to still keep things running smoothly with the APU heating up to 53° Celsius. Touching the right side fins of the chassis, these were quite hot, but to such a degree that one would have to remove their hand quickly.

So, the cooling works and it does so quite well. You should be able to use 95W or even 125W CPUs in the chassis, but I would not go all out on generating unrealistic scenarios to push the thermals. For everyday use, movies, surfing and the likes, those type of processors will be just fine in the Streacom chassis.