External

Looking at the front panel, it’s split in half – a flash black top panel and a brushed aluminum bottom panel, making it look very much like a serious piece of home theatre hardware.

The middle section is the main VFD in the black panel, and it’s seriously detailed. Directly underneath are seven navigation buttons – Menu/Exit, Right, Left, Up, Down, Enter and Return. The right section has the DVD-RW behind the black panel, with the card reader directly underneath in the silver section along with the eject button for the optical drive. The left section has the power button and hard drive/power LEDs, and directly underneath are two USB ports and a mini-FireWire A port (4-pin).



The top panel and side panels are all the same unit. The top section has two air vent mesh panels, positioned over the CPU fan and the CPU heatsink in the middle and back right corner, so you really don’t want to put anything on top of the system while it’s running. The left section has a vent in the middle which is positioned alongside the hard drive. The right section has a vent towards the rear, again for the CPU heatsink.



Looking at the rear of the H663, the left side features mesh panels to allow ventilation to the CPU heatsink again (it gets LOTS of ventilation!) and the six pin mains power socket. In the middle are the audio jacks – MIC-in, Line-out, Line-in and SPDIF out – as well as onboard VGA, two USB ports, a FireWire-A port (6-pin) and gigabit LAN port. Directly above these ports are the DVI and S-Video ports of the expansion graphics card. On the right side are the case expansion slots with the audio-in, video-in, S-Video-in and antenna jacks.



Being an older model and soon to be replaced by the new H971 which we will test soon, the H663 which we are looking at today doesn’t come with any HDMI support, which is somewhat of a disappointment as many HDTV’s will only do 1080p through their HDMI ports. Although if you are not watching HD-DVD or Blu-ray or any other HDCP content, you likely won’t have need for HDMI.