Steiger Dynamics LEET Pure Home Theatre PC Review

There's plenty of storage in the Steiger Dynamics LEET, with the OS installed on a 240GB RAID 0 array of two 120GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSDs with a 4TB Western Digital Red hard disk offering plenty of room for your videos, music and games, and there's a Blu-ray reader too. Noise and cooling are perhaps the most pivotal aspects to an HTPC and Steiger Dynamics has clearly spent some time considering this.


There's a Corsair H80i all-in-one liquid cooler, which has been stripped of its stock fans and paired with a single Scythe Gentle Typhoon acting as an exhaust. Two BitFenix 120mm fans sit in the side panel acting as intakes, blowing air straight at the graphics card while there's the stock 92mm case fan also acting as an intake beneath the hard disk. The case is fully clad in sound absorbing foam too, and the top section rests on a thin layer of velvet to eliminate vibration. Finally, a Seasonic Gold X-660 is an expensive but logical choice in that it costs far more than you're typical enthusiast PSU, but has the advantage that its fan doesn't spin up until it's under heavy load. As a result, it will remain a silent component unless you fire up Crysis 3 - great if music and films feature heavily in your plans.


The case is certainly interesting and appears to be a modified or custom-made by Origen AE, in that we couldn't see it listed anywhere on their website but it clearly resembles said company's premium HTPC cases. The entire case is made from 5mm aluminium with the whole front and side sections being machined from a single piece TJ07-style, which as we all know bumps up the price a bit. The inside is remarkably clear - standing the case on its side, it could easily pass as a micro-ATX tower.


It's also pretty large - the width and depth are fairly typical of a large HTPC case at 43cm x 29cm, however the height of 22cm means you'll need a hefty TV cabinet indeed to house it. Inside, the LEET Pure is one of the cleanest PCs we've seen, with some pretty ninja cable tidying, a fully-braided cable set for the PSU and rounded SATA cables all doing a fantastic job of making the system look just as good with the lid off as it does on, and of course the tidiness aids airflow too.


There is one issue with having a gaming PC in the lounge without a typical PC desk and that's how on earth do you play games using a mouse and keyboard? A gamepad is only useful half the time, but Steiger Dynamics has added an intriguing product from German company Nerdytech that might help overcome the issue of PC gaming away from a desk.


The Couchmaster is a fairly simple padded arch that straddles you on the sofa and allows a full-size keyboard and mouse to be used. There's no need to have several cables stretching to your PC, though, as a four-port USB 3.0 hub with 5m cable is included, with a compartment inside the couchmaster to hide it. It will set you back a further $179 but if FPS gaming is a must, then it's one of the more useful ways to create a comfortable setup for PC gaming on a sofa.