The side and top panels of the AVC-K1 are painted dark grey, while the faceplate is half black, half silver. The AVC-K1 comes in an all black version as well. Only the rear of the case is not painted and is left with the light grey steel color. At the rear of the case, the single 120mm fan is present, covered by a honeycomb design grill. The honeycomb grills tend to be more effective, since they minimize noise. The rear fan is almost inaudible, but a little humming noise can be noticed is someone pays attention in a silent environment. Even so, it is unlikely for the fan to be louder than your hard disk drives. The side panels are both removable and are secured by black thumbscrews.

An air intake funnel is present at the left side panel, but no fan. The funnel serves as a source of fresh air for the CPU heatsink. Removing the funnel will allow the installation of another 120mm fan, although the funnel alone should be enough for most typical home computers. The feet of the case are similar to those we found installed below high end desktop cases. They are made out of rubber, are round, and have aluminum rings encircled around them.

The front of the AVC-K1 is much different than any other tower case we have ever seen. The only downside is that you can mount only two optical drives behind the covers at the top of the case. The other two slots are occupied by the iMon VFD display.

The optical drive covers are made of dark smoked plastic which is slightly reflective, creating a nice dark mirror effect. Just beneath the second drive there are 6 basic media control buttons (pause/play, stop, fast forward/backward, previous/next). That said, the bulk of control buttons are present right at the middle of the faceplate. The huge aluminum knob at the middle of the case controls the sound volume and can mute/unmute your system if pressed inwards.

At the left side, the two basic case keys are present, the power and reset button. Both are made out of aluminum and have chrome edges. The media keys at the right side of the huge knob are similar in design. There are two keys at the top right side of the case, one of which is used to launch your favourite media center application and the other is used as a simple ‘back’ button.

A more sophisticated key is present slightly lower, the surround of which is used as a simple directional joystic (up-down-left-right) and the middle button acts as an ‘Enter’ key. Finally there are 4 simple keys just below the huge middle knob, which navigate between your media center application options (TV-Music-Movie-Photo).

A bit lower than all those buttons is a small door. At first we thought this was a clever idea to hide the 3.5” drive, however we soon found out that the case has a multi card reader pre-installed. Quite handy for transfering data from and to the flash memory cards of almost every device available. Another downside this case has is that you cannot install any external 3.5” device, so you probably have to forget about using a floppy disk drive (given you still have one).

At the lowest most of the front part of the case, there is another door which keeps the front ports of the case hidden. There is a headphones and microphone port, a firewire port and four USB 2.0 ports instead of two. The door has no locking mechanism, it simply stays in place when you close it and it moves very smoothly by the help of the gear present at the right part of it.

Between the front ports bay and the memory card reader, GMC have placed a LCD screen and a fan speed control knob. The LCD is blue with bright white letters and indicates the fan speed at the left and a system temperature reading at the right. With the knob you can control the speed of the two case fans. Pushing the knob inwards will chance the scale of the temperature display from Fahreineit to Celsius degrees.

Behind the smoked plastic at the front of the case, GMC placed the iMon VFD display. This 16 chars x 2 lines display can be programmed via software to display virtually anything you like; the time and date, the weather forecast, the news, some system data or even your unread e-mail titles. It can also display media information and a graphic equalizer if you are using a popular player, such as the Windows Media Player or Winamp. The iMon software offers endless possibilities. We will get into more details about that later.