From the outside, the black SST LC02-B aluminum surface is processed cleanly, but especially the black anodized aluminum front bezel and their edges are sensitive to scratches. Here are silver enclosures clearly more scratch-resistant, or let us better say that these scratches and dust are not as visible as on the black aluminium surface. But beauty has a price and this enclosure is really beautiful. In the upper section you can see the ventilation holes in the correct place to supply the CPU cooler beneath with fresh air and get the hot air out of the case.
Here we see the Power button with the two blue light emitting diodes – the upper LED is designed for power and the lower LED shows the hard disk drive activity.
And here is a picture without external lighting.
On the rear left side you can see the power connector of the integrated power supply, the gap for the rear motherboard I/O panel and the two horizontally mounted slots. As you can see, because of the relatively low overall enclosure height there is not much room on the rear, so that there remains no free space for more case fans.
On one case side are holes for a 60mm fan, which is pre-assembled as already mentioned on the previous technical data page. The noise level of the pre-assembled fan is tolerable, however, a fan with a lower noise level would be recommended for a PC in the living room.
On the opposite side are more holes for an optional 60mm fan and ventilation holes and an I/O panel. The I/O panel offers the usual 3.5mm jacks for headphones and microphone, two USB ports and one Firewire port.
The case cover has two screws at the rear and sits correctly without much margin. Here is a first look into the case, where the power supply with integrated 60mm fan is mounted on the right side and the 60mm fan for the fresh air is pre-assambled directly in front of the PSU. The space is also very limited here, because of the small dimensions. Silverstone tried to find the best solution for this size and Silverstone managed it well (at least as far as possible) inside of the LC02.
To be able to assemble the drives it is necessary to disassemble the holding plate in the center of the chassis. The burs from this holding plate was bad removed, so it was unfortunately very sharp. The height with the middle holding plate could be problematic depending on the motherboard and CPU cooler and even the installation of a relatively flat Xigmatek Apache CPU cooler with about 57mm height was difficult. BTW. once again thanks to Caseking for the CPU cooler.
As DVD or CD-ROM drive it is required to use a slim drive, for example, like used in notebooks. Then this slim drive have to be supplied with this included small 50-pin slimline IDE adapter and screwed careful.
And then you get an ordinary 40-pin IDE ATAPI connector with power, master/slave jumpers and audio output at this Slim DVD drive.
Another specific feature is this so-called PCI riser card to get a horizontally PCI slot. These riser cards are also available for AGP and PCI Express cards. Just put this small enclosed card in the PCI slot …
And now the vertical PCI slot is horizontal.
All connectors of the side I/O plugs, power switch and LEDs of the SST-LC02B are properly labeled. The USB connector and the audio plug is each in a solid block. So it is not necessary as often usually to connect each pin to the mainboard. Nevertheless one should compare the pin allocation of the USB plugs and the audio plug with the motherboard manual before the installation. If a pin does not fit with the layout data of the motherboard manual, the respective pin can be replaced with the right one.
Silverstone equipped the La Scala SST LC02B with a 240 Watt Active PFC PSU ENP-2824 for stable operating of the most popular HTPC hardware components. Of course this PSU is not a power supply for a quad-core CPU with two high-end graphics cards in SLI mode, but this case is not designed for these components. So, this case and power supply unit is rather designed for ordinary HTPC components of the low-range to mid-range. Thanks to the latest HTPC motherboard developments it is for example recommendable to select a motherboard with onboard graphics processor to minimize the power consumption and to use less space inside of the HTPC case.
Result and general impression of the Silverstone La Scala SST LC02B Case …