Arctic MC101-A10 Home Entertainment Centre Review

Please note that we were asked not to open the system as the sample was under heavy rotation and the company were trying to minimise any damage long term. The following pictures have been provided by Arctic for use by our publication.

To enter the system's internal area, a handful of screws must be removed.

Arctic use laptop-sized hardware allowing them to fit the MC101's components into such a confined chassis. A double-stacked pair of SATA 6GB/s connectors means that a secondary 2.5″ hard drive can be installed alongside the default drive.

A laptop-style blower fan and large aluminium-finned heatsink combine to form the heat removal configuration. Due to the heatsink's large size, passive cooling can be achieved when the system is operating in low-load conditions such as web-browsing.

A pair of 204-pin SO-DIMM slots means that RAM upgrades are going to be limited as you will be forced to remove the current modules. The AMD Trinity A10-4600M CPU is located in an area which allows it to be easily removed should you desire a change of hardware.

Arctic include an mPCIe (mSATA) connection above the RAM slots which can be used with an mSATA SSD to give this system a speed boost. The SATA connections are located in an area that allows them to be reached very easily. This makes adding or removing a SATA hard drive a simple task.

A bridge which is connected to a standard PCIe x1 slot is home to the TV Tuner and WiFi card. Both of the SATA 6GB/s ports are also connected to the PCIe slot meaning that bandwidth is likely shared between all 3 devices.

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