Stefan Mileschin

The advent of CPUs with low TDPs (but having enough power to handle HTPC duties) has resulted in passive HTPCs becoming more and more popular. Streacom (started in 2010) designs and manufactures a range of products including active and passive cooled chassis for HTPC and general usage, home theater amplifiers, servers, HTPC accessories and embedded entertainment solutions. In addition, they also offer OEM/ODM services. In fact, Aleutia uses products from Streacom in some of their lineups.

Streacom's current HTPC chassis lineup includes the following models:

FC5 WS Fanless Chassis (June 2011)
F1C Chassis (June 2011)
FC8 Fanless Chassis (July 2011)
F7C Chassis (August 2011)
FC5 OD Fanless Chassis (September 2011)

The passive nature of most of the above models (coupled with the targeting of the HTPC market) resulted in the fact that ATX-sized motherboards couldn't be supported. Last week, Streacom announced two passive chassis models, the FC9 and FC10. Both the models are fully aluminium and available in silver or black color. Streacom's website also lists a set of compatible Streacom-branded power supplies (Nano160, Nano200, Nano200XT and StreaFlex 250), details of which are yet to be fully made public. Streacom has internally tested processors with TDP of up to 120W, but strongly suggests that end users limit themselves to 95W TDP processors for builds involving the FC9 and FC10.