Antec Veris MicroFusion Remote 350 HTPC Case Review

Exterior Impressions Con`t

Next to the integrated LCD screen is a hidden bay which is very perfectly done and does not look out of place when seen from afar. This hidden bay door flips down when you press the integrated eject button and your drive tray opens up. We have had issues with misaligned / misplacement of the eject button versus its location on a drive, so make sure your drive’s button lines up. It should, but some companies have from time to time refused to place it in the normal and logical location and boy can it be a real pain if this happens to you. If it does, we recommend cutting your losses and buying another drive as it is not worth your time, effort or frustration to try and fix.


Directly below the hidden drive bay are the fully visible front panel connectors. From left to right you have a lone eSATA port, 2 USB ports and headphone and MIC jacks. Meanwhile, on the extreme right you have your typical reset and power buttons.

Some people may like having these ports exposed but we don’t and really wish Antec had taken their design philosophy to its logical conclusion and hidden these ports behind a flip down panel. As they say, each to their own; but either way this is certainly a minor issue and can’t be considered a deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination.


The back of this HTPC case has your standardconfiguration, if you consider everything running from left to right instead of up and down “standard”. On the right hand side you have your motherboard’s I/O panel followed by 4 half height / “low profile” peripheral slots. Then at the extreme left side you have your power supply. While it may be smaller than what many people are used to seeing, it is a fairly typical layout.

What is slightly different than you standard fare (yet is very common on this style case) is the fact there are no rear exhaust vents. Simply put, this case is too small to accommodate both the motherboard and a fan on the back of it unless Antec further downsized the fan to 60mm (or most likely 40mm). In all honesty, we are glad Antec didn’t do this as 80mm is not only about as small as we like to see, but more importantly it is about as small as what we like to hear! While it is possible to have relatively quiet 80mm fans, it gets a lot harder to make a quiet 60 or 40mm version which moves any worthwhile amount of air. The lack of frivolous extras such as this is something we have come to expect from Antec and we are glad that they didn’t stick a little buzz saw in the back just to keep up expected appearances.


The most interesting thing about the bottom of the MicroFusion 350 Remote is the feet Antec has gone with. Unlike many cases, Antec has struck an interesting balance between ascetics and vibration dampening, in that the front feet of this case are completely different than the back two. These front two feet are your standard electronics feet found on most high end A/V equpiment and even if Antec had just gone with four of them it would have been noteworthy. Instead of taking even this high road of design features for the back feet, Antec has instead opted for two larger feet which are made of a soft and pliable rubber compound which do a darn good job of dampening vibrations.

Since most of the fans are located on the back half of this case, this small tweak will keep the MicroFusion 350 Remote from sounding like some modern day Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Since the motherboard is also located towards the back, these feet will also help reduce any low frequency vibrations (for example from your overpowered 800 watt sub woofer) from reaching the motherboard and potentially damaging it or one of the peripherals. This is what we like to call long term thinking and it is very nice to have seen Antec do this.

The MicroFusion 350 Remote case itself continues to impress to us with its high quality construction and its combination of style and sophistication show us the hallmark of a great HTPC case. You can easily tell Antec’s designers spent a lot of time and effort on getting it right.