Review: Mcubed HFX barebones PC

If you are looking for a small, stylish barebones case and have a friendly bank manager, then take a look at Mcubed’s HFX Micro M1.

At £500 - without any memory, a CPU, hard drive or TV card - it’s eye-wateringly expensive.

Winner of Intel’s PC Design People’s Choice award, the Micro M1 has a passing resemblance to an upmarket hi-fi amp, with both sides of the chassis finned to aid the cooling properties of the case.

With an oddly attractive colour scheme the Micro M1 measures just 240x86x230mm (wxhxd), but weighs a hefty 3.5kg.

The Micro M1 comes in kit form with motherboard, heatpipe cooler, slim DVD writer (Plextor PX-608Al) and a Vista remote, which also has an SD reader built in.

The motherboard that’s supplied with the Micro M1, Aopen’s I945GMt-FSA mini-ITX board, uses a previous generation mobile chipset, namely Intel’s i945GM. This has Intel’s GMA950 core which, in turn, limits the Micro M1’s potential. While it supports high-definition video, it doesn’t provide any HDMI support.

The motherboard accepts Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs and provides two notebook-style Sodimm slots, which support up to 4GB of DDR667/533 or 400MHz DDR2 modules. The board provides a x1 PCI Express slot, just right for a TV card, although to fit one in you’ll probably need a riser card. This isn’t bundled with the case, which is surprising considering that it costs just £11.99.

On the plus side, it runs silently thanks to the heatpipe technology used to cool the processor in conjunction with the case being part of the cooling mechanism. And the fact that the motherboard is powered by a notebook-style external power supply means there’s no noisy power supply unit. The only noise you’ll hear is from the 2.5in hard drive you chose to install.