There is no air intake on the bottom of the case. The feet are home theater-style, nice-looking and vibration-absorbing.
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Figure 5: Bottom View.
On Figure 6 we can see the external bays door open. This door has a "soft" opening system, so you must just touch the door and it drops slowly. There is room for two 5 ¼” units, and you will probably use them for installing DVD and/or Blu-Ray drives. The removable covers are made of aluminum.
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Figure 6: External bays.
On the bottom part from the front panel there is a door that also opens just as the other: simply press it and it will gently open. So you can see the reset button, audio jacks for earphone and microphone, two USB ports (sadly, very close to each other, so you can not install two "fat" devices such as pen drives and MP3 players the same time), a firewire port (very useful on HTPC computers if you have a digital camcorder that uses this connection) and a card reader for flash memory cards, compatible with almost any standard (according to SilverStone, it is a "52 in 1" card reader).
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Figure 7: Connectors panel.
Looking at the rear panel you can see the case supports ATX motherboards by the seven available expansion slots (micro-ATX cases have only four slots). You can also see the power supply is not in the traditional position (closer to the processor), but on the other side of the motherboard, next to the expansion slots. This is a good solution because it takes cold air from outside to cool down the power supply, and not from inside the case, already heated by other components. So the power supply works cooler. You can also see two 80-mm fans just above the rear panel of the motherboard, which exhaust hot air from around processor and voltage regulator circuit. These fans do not rotate at a high speed (2,050 rpm, according to the manufacturer) and therefore are very quiet. Actually, these fans are almost inaudible.
A problem here is the lack of thumbscrews, which could make user life easier allowing the top cover opening with no tools. However, we must take into account that an HTPC case is not designed to be opened often.
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Figure 8: Rear panel.
