A Quick Look (Continued)

However, it is rather dissapointing to see that the front case bezel is made of plastic. I prefer the whole case to be made of aluminium as the plastic front somehow feels flimsy and cheap. If it was made with much stronger plastic, I would not have complained as much. The plastic sliding door felt like it can easily bend and break off.

Aluminum case on the left, silver plastic front bezel on the right

And as you can also see, the front has a few common ports for your convenience. There are the mic and headphones sockets, two USB ports and a IEEE-1394 Firewire port. The card reader supports five different types of cards via two slots.

The DiGiDice's rear

Checking out the rear of the DiGiDice, the first thing I noticed was that large gaping hole! It left me wondering what was missing from this review unit! Well, read on and you too will find out what is supposed to go in there.

Anyway, there is nothing else here but the usual back panel that where all the connectors and ports are, just like any other PC.

On a more interesting note, the small fan outlet right beside the back panel struck me with a feeling of déjà vu... Remember ABIT's rather innovative and radical OTES cooling on their MAX-series of motherboards?

However, there was no fan or OTES-like cooling system attached to it or the motherboard. Curious, isn't it? Well, the answer shall be revealed later in this review.

The back panel

We can also see that there are three free slots. Does this mean that the DiGiDice motherboard comes with an AGP slot and two PCI slots? Again, we will look into the details later in the review when we examine the internal anatomy of the system.

As you might have noticed by now, the power supply unit or PSU is a very small and slim unit! How else can it fit right beside the back panel?

Of course, most SFF systems come with PSUs that are smaller than the usual ones we see in full-fledge PCs but even then they usually sport a large 8cm fan for cooling purposes. Thanks to the generous size of the DiGiDice, ABIT engineers were able to fit in a 6cm fan, right at the top of the case.

Let's take a look at the bottom of the DiGiDice. We can see two large circular feet at the front and two smaller rubber feet at the back. I would have preferred ABIT to use the large circular feet on the back as well. That would have given the case a more professional look. The small rubber feet at the back somehow made it look rather cheap.

Interestingly, the right-most side of the bottom sports some perforations just under where the PSU unit ends! This allows cool air from beneath the case to be sucked into the case by the PSU. Good positioning of the air intake holes! Finally, it's good to see that ABIT chose to use thumbscrews to secure the case cover in place.